Chris Young stories from The Center for Public Integrity2018-02-21T23:28:43-05:00https://www.publicintegrity.org/node/11634/rssFDA's trans fats ban bucks hands-off approach http://www.publicintegrity.org/node/17493Government usually allows industry to determine safety of food additivesNutrition;Catalysis;Lipids;Trans fat;Trans;Fat2015-06-16T15:16:43-04:002015-06-16T15:15:50-04:00<p>When the U.S. Food and Drug Administration <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2015/06/16/health/fda-trans-fat/">ruled</a> <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-16/u-s-bans-trans-fat-in-a-boost-for-palm-oil-and-a-blow-for-pie">on</a> <a href="http://www.tampabay.com/news/health/fda-takes-steps-to-phase-out-artificial-trans-fats/2233873">Tuesday</a> that artificial trans fats are not safe to eat, it stripped the food additives of their “generally recognized as safe” status.</p>
<p>Such a move is rare: In April, the <a href="https://www.publicintegrity.org/2015/04/14/17112/why-fda-doesnt-really-know-whats-your-food">Center for Public Integrity reported</a> on how the food industry, not the federal government, largely determines whether food additives are safe for consumption. When the food industry declares an additive to be “generally recognized as safe,” or GRAS, the FDA allows food companies to avoid an extensive safety evaluation.</p>
<p>Food companies, many of which have recently chosen to replace trans fats with other oils, have three years to completely remove the additives from their products, according to the FDA.</p>
<p>From now on, companies seeking to add trans fats to food must submit a formal petition to the FDA and undergo a thorough safety assessment.</p>
<p><a href="https://s3.amazonaws.com/public-inspection.federalregister.gov/2015-14883.pdf">The FDA’s ruling</a> today on trans fats — or partially hydrogenated oils — cites a wealth of scientific research linking trans fats to chronic health problems such as heart disease, stroke and Type 2 diabetes.</p>
<p>The move “demonstrates the agency’s commitment to the heart health of all Americans," Stephen Ostroff, the agency’s acting commissioner, <a href="http://www.fda.gov/NewsEvents/Newsroom/PressAnnouncements/ucm451237.htm">said in a statement</a>. "This action is expected to reduce coronary heart disease and prevent thousands of fatal heart attacks every year.”</p>
<p>The Grocery Manufacturers Association, which represents the food industry, said it will work with regulators to ensure that food manufacturers comply with the law within the time frame laid out in the ban.</p>
<p>“GMA is pleased that FDA has acted in a manner that both addresses FDA's concerns and minimizes unnecessary disruptions to commerce. GMA will work in collaboration with FDA to further reduce [trans fats] in foods,” the association’s statement reads.</p>
<p>Trans fats are among many ingredients that public health groups and consumer advocates have pointed to as examples of how potentially unsafe additives can enter the largely industry-regulated food supply with little to no government oversight.</p>
<p>Because the GRAS system is so opaque, critics say, it’s impossible to know whether companies secretly adding ingredients to foods and beverages are monitoring long-term health effects similar to those posed by trans fats.</p>
<p>Trans fats have been used in fried foods, cake mixes and microwave popcorn for decades. But they have long been vilified by public health officials for <a href="http://www.cdc.gov/nutrition/everyone/basics/fat/transfat.html">contributing to the deaths</a> of thousands of Americans.</p>
<p>The ban on trans fats is a victory for public health advocates who have long battled the powerful food industry, which has fought to keep the ingredient in the food supply.</p>
<p>Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association, says the public’s health will greatly benefit from the FDA’s ban on trans fats.</p>
<p>“This is an example of success in terms of people identifying an unhealthy food additive and pushing the FDA, despite enormous industry resistance, to do the right thing in terms of protecting public health,” he said.</p>
<p>Today’s announcement finalizes a <a href="http://www.fda.gov/NewsEvents/Newsroom/PressAnnouncements/ucm373939.htm">preliminary ruling</a> issued two years ago by the FDA concluding that trans fats are no longer safe to eat.</p>
<p><em>Erin Quinn contributed to this report</em></p>
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A doughnut hamburger.
Chris Younghttps://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/chris-youngFood flavor safety system a ‘black box’http://www.publicintegrity.org/node/17465But industry says self-policing poses no threat to consumers.Food science;Food additives;Cuisine;Food;Flavor;Flavors;Flavorist;Flavor and Extract Manufacturers Association2015-06-09T08:56:17-04:002015-06-09T05:00:00-04:00<p>Ingredients created by food companies flavor what Americans eat each day — everything from juice drinks&nbsp;and potato chips&nbsp;to ice cream&nbsp;and canned soups. They give Cheetos&nbsp;their addictive cheesy taste and help distinguish Jolly Ranchers&nbsp;from other fruit-flavored candies.</p>
<p>But the organization responsible for the safety of most “natural” and “artificial” flavors that end up in foods and beverages isn’t part of the U.S. government. Rather, the Flavor and Extract Manufacturers Association — a secretive food industry trade group that has no in-house employees,&nbsp;no office of its own&nbsp;and a minuscule budget&nbsp;— serves as the de-facto regulator of the nation’s flavor additives.</p>
<p>The trade association, which operates <a href="https://www.publicintegrity.org/2015/04/14/17112/why-fda-doesnt-really-know-whats-your-food">with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s blessing</a>, says that it makes research on the safety of various flavors available for public inspection.</p>
<p>“Oh, garbage,” said <a href="http://www.ece.ncsu.edu/people/ssschiff">Susan Schiffman</a>, an adjunct professor at North Carolina State University&nbsp;who studies sweeteners.&nbsp;“It’s not transparent.”</p>
<p>In late 2012, Schiffman and a colleague from the National Institutes of Health were months away from publishing a paper examining the biological effects of the popular artificial sweetener sucralose.</p>
<p>But first they needed to contact the Flavor and Extract Manufacturers Association.</p>
<p>The trade group, Schiffman learned, had recently approved the safety of a chemical compound that amplifies sweetness.&nbsp;She says she contacted the Flavor and Extract Manufacturers Association in December 2012 to learn the chemical’s name and identification number so that she could research its safety.</p>
<p>“They said, ‘We’ll call you back.’ No call back. So I called again. No call back,” Schiffman remembered. “So then I wrote a letter. Nothing happened.”</p>
<p>While her persistent requests went unanswered, Schiffman says she eventually received the information she needed from a flavor expert unaffiliated with the trade association. But Schiffman still had a problem: She couldn’t find safety data on the chemical anywhere.</p>
<p>When a scientist from the trade association finally called her back, Schiffman says she asked him for data supporting the safety of the sweetness-enhancing compound. But she says he refused to give it to her.</p>
<p>“‘There’s something in the food supply, and I can’t find out the toxicity of it?’” Schiffman recalled asking the flavor group scientist who declined her request. “They would not give me the safety data… It was absolutely astounding.”</p>
<p>The <a href="https://www.femaflavor.org/about-fema">Flavor and Extract Manufacturers Association</a> disputes Schiffman’s version of events.</p>
<p>John Cox, the trade group’s executive director, wrote in an emailed statement to the <a href="http://www.publicintegrity.org">Center for Public Integrity</a> that Schiffman requested only information on the safety status of the flavor, which was “promptly provided” to her. But he said she never asked for the data supporting the determination.</p>
<p>“If Dr. Schiffman had requested the safety data,” Cox wrote, “we would have provided it to her.”</p>
<p>Public interest groups, however, share Schiffman’s frustration with the trade association. They, too, report getting stonewalled by the flavor group when requesting information about the industry’s safety determinations.</p>
<p><strong>A ‘black box’</strong></p>
<p>The largely industry-run system for evaluating flavors is “fundamentally problematic because it’s so opaque,” said&nbsp;<a href="http://www.nrdc.org/about/staff/erik-olson">Erik Olson</a>, the Natural Resources Defense Council’s senior strategic director for health and food.&nbsp;“It’s a black box.”</p>
<p>Yet the system factors into food products found in nearly every consumer’s grocery cart.</p>
<p>In recent years, activist groups and social media campaigns have been demanding that food companies become more accountable to consumers and transparent about what they are adding to their products.</p>
<p>But most Americans know as little about the decidedly low-profile Flavor and Extract Manufacturers Association and its safety assessments as they do about the more than 2,700 flavoring chemicals it has declared safe during the past five decades.</p>
<p>Moreover, public interest groups say the FDA’s recent response to a Freedom of Information Act request suggests that even the government may be blind to the science behind many of those flavors.</p>
<p>Much is at stake: The flavor industry’s system of self-policing helps it avoid government oversight, potentially saving companies significant amounts of time and money. In Europe, by contrast, companies must have their flavors and other ingredients reviewed for safety by an independent agency funded by the European Union.</p>
<p>The flavor industry makes its safety evaluations “behind closed doors” and then asks consumers to trust them, said Caroline Cox, research director for the&nbsp;<a href="http://www.ceh.org/">Center for Environmental Health</a>.&nbsp;“We just have enough experience with all kinds of toxic chemicals to know not to want to trust an evaluation if someone says, ‘Trust us, it’s all OK.’”</p>
<p>“There is some real need for reform here,” Rep. Chellie Pingree, D-Maine, who serves on a subcommittee that oversees the FDA, said in an emailed statement. “We can do better than just letting the flavor industry decide for themselves which chemicals they can put in food without any oversight.”</p>
<p>Industry officials say flavors used in food sold in the United States are safe, pointing out that they pose very little health risk because they are used in such small doses. But identifying health concerns would seem to be difficult with so little scientific information publicly available behind some of the trade group’s safety decisions.</p>
<p>A Center for Public Integrity review of documents provided by the Flavor and Extract Manufacturers Association found that four of the group’s most recent safety assessments depended largely on studies&nbsp;that were not published in scientific literature. Public interest groups say that is problematic because it doesn’t allow the scientific community to vouch for the industry’s safety decisions.</p>
<p>The Center for Public Integrity contacted two dozen flavor companies to discuss their ingredients and the process by which they evaluate their safety. Most of them either declined to comment or ignored interview requests.</p>
<p>Two company officials who responded in writing both stressed that flavor companies are very guarded about discussing such information.</p>
<p>“Given the competitive landscape in our industry, many companies, including ours, regard our flavor formulations as valuable proprietary business information,” Donald Wilkes, president and chief executive officer of California-based Blue Pacific Flavors, emailed in response to questions.&nbsp;“We typically do not share this information unless required to do so for legal reasons.”</p>
<p>Nevertheless, the public should be assured food flavor safety standards are high, said Kevin Renskers, president-elect of the Flavor and Extract Manufacturers Association and vice president for corporate safety and regulatory affairs at Takasago International Corp.</p>
<p>“FEMA operates the premier global program to assure the safety of flavor materials,” he responded in an email.</p>
<p><strong>Lucrative business</strong></p>
<p>The companies that make up the flavor industry — including international manufacturers such as Givaudan, Firmenich and Sensient&nbsp;— are not household names. But they make their money by selling flavors to big food companies such as Kellogg, Kraft and Nestlé.</p>
<p>Last year, Switzerland-based Givaudan reported 4.4 billion Swiss francs (roughly&nbsp;<a href="http://www.givaudan.com/media/media-releases/2015/2014-annual-results">$4.8 billion</a>) in sales of flavor ingredients. The company leads the industry with about 25 percent of the global market share in flavors and fragrances.</p>
<p>“The modern processed food industry could not flourish without the flavor industry,” said Kantha Shelke, a food scientist and spokeswoman for the Institute of Food Technologists, a society of food science professionals.</p>
<p>Today, Shelke said, the flavor industry is “big, it’s complicated and it’s sophisticated” — to the point where companies can create a product that tastes like guacamole without even using avocado as an&nbsp;ingredient.&nbsp;The goal, one industry scientist&nbsp;<a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-flavorists-tweaking-tastes-and-creating-cravings-27-11-2011/">told CBS’ 60 Minutes</a>&nbsp;in 2011, is to develop addictive flavors that consumers “want to go back for again and again.”</p>
<p>Shelke says flavor companies don’t like to discuss their flavor compounds, partly because they are worried about scaring “chemophobic” consumers who might be frightened by long, unfriendly-sounding chemical names.</p>
<p>Consumers’ growing unease with chemicals in food has recently led companies to remove some controversial ingredients from their products. Fast food chain Subway, for example,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.cnn.com/2014/02/06/health/subway-bread-chemical/">announced last year</a>&nbsp;that it was removing azodicarbonamide from its bread after a popular food blogger revealed that the chemical, used as a dough conditioner,&nbsp;was also used in making yoga mats.&nbsp;</p>
<p>Within the last month, Subway,&nbsp;Taco Bell and Pizza Hut&nbsp;<a href="http://time.com/3908918/subway-artificial-ingredients/">each</a>&nbsp;<a href="http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2015/05/26/taco-bell-pizza-hut-artificial-ingredients/27953829/">announced plans</a>&nbsp;to remove artificial colors and flavorings from their products.</p>
<p>By law, flavor ingredients only have to be listed on food labels as “natural” or “artificial”&nbsp;— and rarely do labels volunteer additional information.&nbsp;Natural flavors are derived from plants and animals, while artificial flavors are synthetic chemicals. Both are produced in labs by scientists.</p>
<p>When it comes to questions about safety, flavor companies typically defer to the Flavor and Extract Manufacturers Association. The group is managed by&nbsp;<a href="http://www.vertosolutions.net/">Verto Solutions</a>&nbsp;— a Washington, D.C., firm that provides scientific consulting, communications and government relations services to the flavor group, as well as other similar trade associations, including the International Association of Color Manufacturers, the International Organization of the Flavor Industry and Pickle Packers International.</p>
<p>While the Flavor and Extract Manufacturers Association reports no lobbying,&nbsp;it understands Congress’ power to regulate the food industry. The group is hosting its second annual congressional&nbsp;<a href="http://www.femaflavor.org/events/flavors-hill-2015">“fly-in” event</a>&nbsp;on June 16-17 to “increase its visibility” and meet with representatives “to ensure that they are aware of the U.S. flavor manufacturing industry and its importance to the economy,” according to its website.</p>
<p><strong>‘The highest standards for transparency’</strong></p>
<p>The Flavor and Extract Manufacturers Association’s program for evaluating the safety of flavors has won praise from some corners of government, namely the FDA and the Government Accountability Office.</p>
<p>Its flavor safety program launched in 1960&nbsp;— two years after Congress passed the first law regulating ingredients added to food.</p>
<p>The law allows food companies to bypass a lengthy government-led safety review if they can establish that their ingredients are “generally recognized as safe,” or GRAS, for their intended use.</p>
<p>In other words, companies using the so-called GRAS process must demonstrate that there is a consensus among scientific experts that their ingredients are safe.</p>
<p>Companies have the option of involving the FDA in the process, but most ingredient manufacturers choose to make safety determinations without&nbsp;<a href="https://www.publicintegrity.org/2015/04/14/17112/why-fda-doesnt-really-know-whats-your-food">government oversight</a>.</p>
<p>In Europe, the industry doesn’t have the option to police itself.</p>
<p>The European Union requires companies to have their new flavors and other additives reviewed by the European Food Safety Authority,&nbsp;an independent agency funded by the European Union.</p>
<p>The Flavor and Extract Manufacturers Association’s member companies — which produce 95 percent of all flavors on the market in the United States&nbsp;— typically forgo FDA review and instead choose to submit their flavors to the trade association for a safety review.</p>
<p>A standing panel of six to eight scientific experts oversees the trade group’s safety program and determines whether ingredients are generally understood to be safe by the scientific community. These experts, who are paid by the trade association, review published and unpublished data before making a conclusion on the safety of an ingredient’s use.</p>
<p>“From Takasago’s perspective, to have GRAS approval by the FEMA Expert Panel provides us with a high level of confidence that our material can be used safely,” said Renskers, the company official and Flavor and Extract Manufacturers Association president-elect.</p>
<p>Industry officials stress that flavor ingredients generally pose very little safety risk because they are used in such small amounts in food.&nbsp;The trade group used this argument to support its conclusion that methyl eugenol is safe, despite studies finding that it causes cancer in animals.</p>
<p>The naturally occurring flavor, which the FDA has approved as a food additive, is used in foods including jellies, baked goods and chewing gum.&nbsp;The Flavor and Extract Manufacturers Association first determined methyl eugenol to be GRAS in 1965,&nbsp;but the group revisited that decision in 2001 after studies by the National Toxicology Program found “clear evidence of carcinogenic activity” of the substance in male and female rats and mice.</p>
<p>But the trade group still concluded that methyl eugenol “does not pose a significant cancer risk” to humans because it is used in food at such low levels.</p>
<p>After the trade group reconfirmed that it was safe, the International Agency for Research on Cancer found that methyl eugenol is “possibly carcinogenic to humans.”</p>
<p>The Flavor and Extract Manufacturers Association notes that many of the flavors it has reviewed over the years have also been evaluated for safety by other scientific bodies, including the European Food Safety Authority.</p>
<p>The Government Accountability Office praised the Flavor and Extract Manufacturers Association’s program in&nbsp;<a href="http://www.gao.gov/assets/310/300743.pdf">a 2010 report</a>&nbsp;about the FDA’s limited oversight of food additives, specifically highlighting its procedures to prevent&nbsp;<a href="http://www.publicintegrity.org/2015/04/15/17144/food-safety-scientists-have-ties-big-tobacco">conflicts of interest</a>&nbsp;and its practice of voluntarily informing the FDA about each of its safety determinations.</p>
<p>Scientists who serve on the flavor group’s expert panel are forbidden from having financial ties to companies submitting flavors for review. To that end, panelists’ stipends come from the trade association, rather than from companies directly. Panelists also review the safety of ingredients without knowing which company submitted them.</p>
<p>For these reasons and more, the trade group bills its GRAS program as&nbsp;<a href="http://www.femaflavor.org/gras#conflict">“fully objective” and “not subject to bias.”</a></p>
<p>The Government Accountability Office report further applauded the Flavor and Extract Manufacturers Association for informing the FDA of flavor names, properties and reasons for the expert panel’s&nbsp;conclusion when notifying the agency of new safety determinations.</p>
<p>But if the FDA has such information, it can’t find it, according to the agency’s response to a recent Freedom of Information Act request.</p>
<p>Last October, the&nbsp;<a href="http://www.cspinet.org/about/index.html">Center for Science in the Public Interest</a>&nbsp;requested “all information that the Flavor and Extract Manufacturers Association (FEMA) has supplied to FDA since 1960 as support for its determinations that flavors it has evaluated are generally recognized as safe, or GRAS.”</p>
<p>The FDA’s May 21 response: “We have searched our files and find no responsive information.”</p>
<p>Laura MacCleery, the attorney for the public interest group who filed the records request,&nbsp;said she was “shocked” that the FDA’s response appears to contradict the flavor trade group’s public statements about sharing information with the FDA.</p>
<p>“We were worried about how we would handle the volume of documents,” MacCleery said. “I guess that’s not a concern.”</p>
<p>In an email, FDA spokeswoman Lauren Sucher said that the trade group “provides information about its GRAS lists to the FDA,” but she did not explain why this information was not produced in response to the public records request.</p>
<p>In addition, she said that a separate organization, the Joint FAO/WHO Expert Committee on Food Additives, which is affiliated with the World Health Organization, “has evaluated nearly 2,000 FEMA flavoring agents.” Those evaluations are based on information provided to them by the trade group, according to the FDA. Since the mid-1990s, FDA staff has participated in the evaluations conducted by the international organization, Sucher added.</p>
<p>The GAO said that it based its 2010 report on interviews with the trade group and the FDA. Steve Morris, GAO’s director for food safety and agriculture, said in an email that he was not sure why the FDA could not produce the documents requested by the Center for Science in the Public Interest.</p>
<p>Overall, the FDA praises the trade group’s safety program.</p>
<p>“In the FDA’s experience,” Sucher wrote in an email, “FEMA makes scientifically rigorous, credible determinations that have stood up to the scrutiny of the scientific community of qualified experts.”</p>
<p>For its part, the Flavor and Extract Manufacturers Association says it has long provided the FDA “with the basis for [each] FEMA GRAS determination … including all of the safety data.”&nbsp;Providing the Center &nbsp;for Science in the Public Interest “with all of the information that FEMA has provided to FDA since 1960 would likely fill five hundred boxes,” the trade group’s Cox said in a written response.</p>
<p>The trade association periodically announces its determinations in a food industry trade magazine,&nbsp;but those announcements do not include the data supporting the safety assessments.</p>
<p>However, the trade group, which boasts that its GRAS program “meets the highest standards for transparency,” says it will share safety data with any member of the public for only a copying fee.</p>
<p><strong>Safety process questioned</strong></p>
<p>Schiffman isn’t the only scientist who has recently cried foul on the Flavor and Extract Manufacturers Association.</p>
<p>Last September, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Center for Science in the Public Interest and other public interest groups argued in a letter to the FDA that the trade group’s flavor safety program “does not comply with FDA policies.”</p>
<p>Their chief complaint: that the flavor trade association bases its safety decisions for new flavor chemicals on unpublished safety data.</p>
<p>To establish ingredients as “generally recognized as safe,” determinations typically rely on published studies to show that qualified scientists generally agree that the ingredients won’t harm consumers. This process allows companies to avoid subjecting their ingredients to an extensive FDA-led safety review.</p>
<p>The consumer groups’ letter points to comments Michael Taylor, the FDA’s deputy commissioner for food, made to The Washington Post last August: “The [GRAS] assessments need to be based on publicly available information where there is agreement among scientists,” the&nbsp;<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/food-additives-on-the-rise-as-fda-scrutiny-wanes/2014/08/17/828e9bf8-1cb2-11e4-ab7b-696c295ddfd1_story.html"><em>Post&nbsp;</em>quoted Taylor</a>&nbsp;as saying. “It has got to be more than three employees in a room looking at information that is only available to them.”</p>
<p>But the Flavor and Extract Manufacturers Association, the public interest groups charge, doesn’t always follow such guidance.</p>
<p>In their letter to the FDA, they said they could find “no relevant published safety data” establishing the safety of a handful of flavors declared safe by the trade group last July.</p>
<p>“We asked FEMA for the published data on the four substances and it said there was none,” the letter stated, adding that the trade group offered to make 7,000 pages of unpublished data available for a&nbsp;$1,000 processing fee. “This practice is contrary to FDA guidance … and a common sense definition of general recognition.”</p>
<p>The Center for Public Integrity sent the FDA a detailed list of questions about the trade group’s flavor safety program. The list included inquiries about the advocacy groups’ complaints, the agency’s interpretation of regulations regarding the use of published data and the extent to which the agency reviews each of the trade association’s safety determinations.</p>
<p>After nearly two weeks,&nbsp;FDA spokeswoman Sucher emailed that “there are so many questions that we do not currently have the resources available to provide individual responses.”</p>
<p>Olson, of the Natural Resources Defense Council, said FDA officials met with representatives of the public interest groups late last year to discuss their concerns about the trade association’s flavor safety program.</p>
<p>While agency officials listened to their complaints, he said they made no commitment to requiring the trade group to change how it runs its program.</p>
<p>Officials from the Flavor and Extract Manufacturers Association’s management firm would only answer questions in writing. The expert panelists paid by the trade group to assess the safety of flavors either declined to comment or did not respond to interview requests.</p>
<p>The trade association’s expert panel “reviews all available information relevant to its GRAS assessment to assure the safety of the candidate flavoring substance under its conditions of intended use whether the data are published or unpublished,” Cox wrote in response to questions.</p>
<p>He cited a section of the regulations governing GRAS assessments that notes that they “shall ordinarily” be based upon published studies.</p>
<p>In his response, however, Cox didn’t clearly answer a question about whether the trade group used only unpublished data to conclude that those four approved ingredients were generally recognized as safe. The Center for Public Integrity asked the trade group in an email to clarify how exactly those four safety determinations were made. Two days later, late on a Friday afternoon, two boxes of documents arrived&nbsp;at its newsroom.</p>
<p>Inside: 9,000 pages — 75 pounds — of published and unpublished safety data supporting four of the most recently approved flavors, including what the trade association described as a fruity flavor, a savory flavor and a minty, cooling flavor.</p>
<p>The trade association declined a request to review the documents with reporters.</p>
<p><strong>A ‘daisy chain of inference’</strong></p>
<p>A Center for Public Integrity review of the documents revealed that the four safety determinations were based mostly on unpublished studies, many of which redacted the name of the chemical being studied to comply with the trade group’s conflict of interest procedures.</p>
<p>The published reports used as safety evidence for three of the four chemicals evaluated not the specific chemical at hand, but a component of it or a structurally related substance. After reviewing the documents at the Center for Public Integrity’s request, researchers who have authored several reports on the GRAS system for the Natural Resources Defense Council were skeptical.</p>
<p>“It’s a daisy chain of inference,” Tom Neltner, an attorney and chemical engineer, said as he looked over the documents.</p>
<p>Without published studies assessing the safety of the specific chemical in question, “It’s hard to say it’s ‘generally recognized as safe,’” added Olson.</p>
<p>As he leafed through documents, Olson said that the four flavors in question should have instead been submitted to the FDA for a thorough evaluation.</p>
<p>But the Flavor and Extract Manufacturers Association contends that it is operating according to government policies. In a written response to questions, Cox pointed out that safety assessments can involve “data on structurally related substances.”&nbsp;</p>
<p>FDA guidance states that such information can be used to support a safety determination, “depending on the circumstances.”</p>
<p>The FDA, however, did not respond to specific questions asking if the agency agreed that the trade association was following the rules on published data.</p>
<p>“When you have an industry like this making safety decisions, we are dependent on this trade association getting it right in order to protect public health,” Neltner said. “But the system is so opaque.”</p>
<p>Little is known about many of these chemicals outside the trade association, said Maricel Maffini, a scientist who has co-authored several Natural Resources Defense Council reports on food additives.</p>
<p>“You have to basically trust their judgment."</p>
<p><strong><em>This story was co-published with <a href="http://time.com/3913232/natural-flavoring-government/">TIME</a> and <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/06/08/food-flavoring-regulation_n_7539134.html?utm_hp_ref=politics">Huffington Post</a>.&nbsp;</em></strong></p>
Just some of the products on American grocery shelves which include "natural" and "artificial" flavors.
Chris Younghttps://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/chris-youngErin Quinnhttps://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/erin-quinnWhy nobody knows what's really going into your foodhttp://www.publicintegrity.org/node/17181Companies take advantage of a loophole allowing them to deem a food additive &quot;generally recognized as safe&quot; without the FDA&#039;s knowledge.Food additives;Food and Drug Administration;Food law;Food safety;Generally recognized as safe2015-04-17T16:41:46-04:002015-04-17T13:36:28-04:00<p><strong>Video transcript:</strong></p>
<p>In 2008, when an Australian food manufacturer wanted the US federal government’s stamp of approval on the company’s new ingredients, regulators said no.&nbsp;But go inside many American supermarkets and you’ll find products containing them on the shelves.</p>
<p>So how do&nbsp;<em>new ingredients</em>&nbsp;get from the lab to your dinner table?</p>
<p>When companies create new food additives – to improve their product’s texture, taste, appearance, or to extend their shelf life – they have two choices:</p>
<p>The “Food Additive Highway” is a gridlocked route marked by government potholes. Traffic here is policed by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration - the federal agency that regulates 80 percent of the nation’s food supply.</p>
<p>Companies traveling this path must submit their food additives to extensive review.&nbsp;Then the FDA may issue its formal approval.&nbsp;This journey can take years —&nbsp;even decades —&nbsp;to complete.</p>
<p>So it’s no surprise that companies often take an alternative route.</p>
<p>This&nbsp;road is paved by a legal loophole that hinges on what counts as a “food additive.”</p>
<p>Changes to the law in the fifties created this two-lane system where anything “Generally Recognized As Safe”, or GRAS, travels down a much smoother road to market.</p>
<p>These “GRAS” ingredients are not considered food additives and effectively get a pass to the fast lane.</p>
<p>This “GRAS” clause means companies can determine&nbsp;<em>on their own</em>&nbsp;that what they’re adding to our food is safe.</p>
<p>Then it’s up to the company to inform the FDA if they want to.&nbsp;That’s right.&nbsp;Companies have no legal obligation to tell the FDA what they’re putting in our food.</p>
<p>But if they do&nbsp;decide to pull in for inspection they could get the FDA ‘OK’, which makes them more attractive to potential distributors.</p>
<p>But what if the FDA&nbsp;<em>doesn’t&nbsp;</em>like what it sees?</p>
<p>Take lupin – it’s a legume from same family as peanuts.&nbsp;It’s often used in Mediterranean cooking.&nbsp;It can also be ground into flour and used in gluten free food.</p>
<p>In 2008, when George Weston Foods told the FDA that they’d certified the use of lupin based flour, protein, and fibre in food as safe,&nbsp;regulators at the FDA disagreed.&nbsp;It found that people with peanut allergies could suffer “life-threatening reactions” to lupin-ingredients.&nbsp;FDA officials said ingredient labels listing lupin wouldn’t be enough to protect consumers.&nbsp;The regulators refused to agree that the ingredients were Generally Recognized As Safe.</p>
<p>So George Weston Foods withdrew the notification. But other companies skipped the FDA checkpoint altogether.</p>
<p>The Center for Public Integrity found products containing lupin on supermarket shelves.&nbsp;None&nbsp;included warnings for people who suffer from peanut allergies.</p>
<p>Companies have added at least 1000&nbsp;ingredients to the food we eat without ever telling the FDA.</p>
<p><strong>Video credits</strong></p>
<p>​Production: Eleanor Bell and&nbsp;Jared Bennett</p>
<p>Reporting: Erin Quinn and Chris Young</p>
<p>Animation: Phillip Allen</p>
<p>Voiceover: John Ketchum</p>
<p>Executive Producer: Kimberley Porteous</p>
Phillip Allenhttps://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/phillip-allenEleanor Bell Foxhttps://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/eleanor-bell-foxJared Bennetthttps://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/jared-bennettErin Quinnhttps://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/erin-quinnChris Younghttps://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/chris-youngConsumer group: Federal food additive safety process is illegalhttp://www.publicintegrity.org/node/17160People are consuming &#039;potentially dangerous chemicals,&#039; advocates tell federal regulatorsFood science;Food and Drug Administration;Food law;Food additive;Consumer organization;Coordinated Framework for Regulation of Biotechnology;Federal Institute for Risk Assessment2015-04-15T13:18:41-04:002015-04-15T13:18:00-04:00<p>The Center for Science in the Public Interest today charged that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s process for overseeing food additives is illegal.</p>
<p>“Consumers are being exposed to potentially dangerous chemicals that industry self-certifies as safe for use in foods, with little or no scrutiny from the Food and Drug Administration,” the consumer advocacy group said in a <a href="http://cspinet.org/new/201504151.html">press release</a> that accompanied comments the group filed with the agency.</p>
<p>Center for Public Integrity <a href="https://www.publicintegrity.org/2015/04/14/17112/why-fda-doesnt-really-know-whats-your-food">reported</a> this week how a legal loophole created in a 57-year-old law allows the food industry to determine whether additives can be deemed “generally recognized as safe,” or GRAS, and avoid a rigorous pre-market government safety review.</p>
<p>A <a href="https://www.publicintegrity.org/2015/04/15/17144/food-safety-scientists-have-ties-big-tobacco">second Center for Public Integrity story</a>, published today, details how the food industry repeatedly turns to the same small group of scientists to evaluate the safety of food additives they hope to market. Many of those scientists have done similar work for the tobacco industry, the investigation shows.</p>
<p>The <a href="https://www.cspinet.org/about/">Center for Science in the Public Interest</a> argues in its 80-page filing with the FDA that the agency cannot fulfill its obligation to protect public health. The group notes that the current food additive safety system allows food companies to add new flavors, preservatives and other ingredients to foods and beverages without even telling the FDA.</p>
<p>The group, along with three cosigners — the Natural Resources Defense Council, Consumers Union and Environmental Working Group — further state in the comments that the secretive process “undermines FDA’s ability to conduct meaningful scientific assessments of the safety of food additives.”</p>
<p>In response to a&nbsp;<a href="http://www.centerforfoodsafety.org/files/2014-3-13-dkt-8--pls--am-compl_76904.pdf">lawsuit filed last year</a>, the FDA is planning to finalize proposed rules governing the GRAS system. The agency re-opened the public comment period for the rules in 2011, through which the Center for Science in the Public Interest filed its comments today.</p>
<p>The Center for Science in the Public Interest proposed that the FDA limit which ingredients may circumvent agency review, minimize financial conflicts of interest for scientists and improve the quality and quantity of scientific data behind safety decisions.</p>
<p>“The FDA’s job is to ensure the safety of our food supply,” Erik Olson, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s health program, said in the press release. “It should be doing much more to protect our health — not outsourcing decisions on the safety of thousands of chemicals in our food to industry.”</p>
<p>The FDA did not immediately respond to requests for comment.</p>
<p>But an earlier interview, Dennis Keefe, director of the FDA's Office of Food Additive Safety, stated that proposed additive safety rules in 1997 were never finalized because of “a resource issue” that the agency would have in addressing public comments and getting a rulemaking through general counsel. Keefe said he could not speculate on possible changes to proposed rules.</p>
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FILE - In this Monday, Oct. 30, 2006 file photo, a Kentucky Fried Chicken employee uses tongs to hold up an sample of the company's trans fat-free Extra Crispy fried chicken in New York. New York City now has hard evidence that its ban on trans fat in restaurant food made a meaningful dent in people's consumption of the artery clogger and wasn't just replaced with another bad fat. The findings being published Tuesday, July 16, 2012 have implications beyond heart health, suggesting another strategy to curb the nation's obesity epidemic fueled by a high-calorie, super-sized environment. (AP Photo/Kathy Willens, File)
Erin Quinnhttps://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/erin-quinnChris Younghttps://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/chris-youngFood safety scientists have ties to Big Tobaccohttp://www.publicintegrity.org/node/17144At least 10 scientists who approve food additives did similar work for Big Tobacco.Tobacco;Entheogens;Leaves;Gu;Doubt Is Their Product2015-04-18T00:29:56-04:002015-04-15T05:00:00-04:00<p>Joseph Borzelleca has been evaluating the safety of <a href="https://www.publicintegrity.org/2015/04/14/17112/why-fda-doesnt-really-know-whats-your-food">food additives</a> longer than pretty much anyone else in the business. The 84-year-old toxicologist, who credits his career to Italian parents who taught him to love food, has helped companies bring hundreds of new ingredients to market.</p>
<p>“Food to me was always very important,” said Borzelleca, a long-time professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, who has been reviewing the safety of food additives since the 1960s. “I had an interest in food, not just from a nutritional perspective but from a historical and safety” perspective.</p>
<p>A Center for Public Integrity analysis of <a href="http://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/fdcc/index.cfm?set=GRASNotices&amp;sort=GRN_No&amp;order=DESC&amp;showAll=true&amp;type=basic&amp;search=">publicly available</a>&nbsp;data&nbsp;found that Borzelleca is the most active of a small group of scientists — including several with ties to Big Tobacco —&nbsp;&nbsp;that the food industry turns to over and over again to determine whether additives can be deemed “generally recognized as safe,” or GRAS, and avoid a rigorous pre-market government safety review.</p>
<p>Of the 379 panels convened to review the safety of new ingredients in the last 17 years, the <a href="http://www.publicintegrity.org">Center for Public Integrity</a>&nbsp;found, three-quarters included at least one of these 10 scientists. But none has even come close to serving on as many as Borzelleca, who has appeared on 41 percent of them.</p>
<p>Despite his decades of experience and praise heaped upon him by colleagues — one called him a “wonder” — critics of the GRAS system say Borzelleca is emblematic of a system that is rife with conflicts of interest. If scientists depend on the food industry for income, they may be less likely to contest the safety of ingredients companies hope to market, critics say.</p>
<p>“These are standing panels of industry hired guns,” said Laura MacCleery, an attorney for the Center for Science in the Public Interest. “It is funding bias on steroids.”</p>
<p>Borzelleca and many of his colleagues who work with the food industry have done similar work for another well-known industry: Big Tobacco.</p>
<p>The Center for Public Integrity found that at least four of the top 10 GRAS panel experts, including Borzelleca, had also served as scientific consultants for cigarette makers.</p>
<p><strong>Final word</strong></p>
<p>The expert panels that review a new food additive to determine if it’s “generally recognized as safe” have great power because they can have the final word on that ingredient and its use. Once the group deems a new additive GRAS, it can go into an array of foods that end up on supermarket shelves, with no notice to or review by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.</p>
<p>That gives food companies an incentive to turn to experts they believe will look kindly upon their ingredients, and gives scientists incentive to do so, critics say.</p>
<p>“If I know that my paycheck is coming from a specific source, and I’ve been doing that for years and years, and that is what feeds me and my family, it becomes really difficult for me to be totally independent of the hand that is feeding me,” said Erik Olson, senior strategic director for health and food at the Natural Resources Defense Council.</p>
<p>Many scientific consultants dispute accusations that they are conflicted, arguing instead that they are the most qualified and most experienced scientists for the job.</p>
<p>“If you’re good at something, of course you’re going to be in demand,” Borzelleca said, adding that he focuses solely on safety and never considers companies’ marketing plans. “I know GRAS pretty well. It’s not a boast. It’s a statement of fact.”</p>
<p><strong>A small world</strong></p>
<p>A 1958 law allows companies to market &nbsp;ingredients without oversight by the U.S.&nbsp;Food and Drug Administration if they can establish that their ingredients are “generally recognized as safe” for specific uses. In other words, companies using the so-called GRAS process must demonstrate that there is a consensus among scientific experts that their ingredients are safe.&nbsp; &nbsp;</p>
<p>To do so, they usually convene a panel of scientists to review articles and opinions of authoritative bodies like the National Academy of Sciences to determine if an ingredient is safe for a particular use. Of 562 publicly available GRAS determinations voluntarily submitted to the FDA since 1998, a Center for Public Integrity analysis found that companies used such panels&nbsp;two-thirds of the time.</p>
<p>These panels, typically composed of three members, are meant to represent the scientific community at large. And they are particularly useful for establishing scientific consensus “when an individual published study raises safety questions” about an ingredient, according to FDA guidance.</p>
<p>"As long as you adhere to science-based review," said John Thomas, a scientific&nbsp;consultant, "then I don't think there's a better peer-reviewed process in place."</p>
<p>The world of GRAS panelists is a small one. A Center for Public Integrity&nbsp;analysis found that the top 10 most frequently hired panelists have each sat on two dozen or more panels.</p>
<p>Borzelleca has participated in 156 panels in the last 17 years&nbsp;— almost three times as many as either of the next two most popular panelists: &nbsp;Thomas, an adjunct professor at the Indiana University School of Medicine, and Michael Pariza, a professor emeritus and former director of the University of Wisconsin’s industry-funded Food Research Institute.</p>
<p>Thomas and Pariza have each served on more than 50 panels that evaluated the safety of ingredients.</p>
<p>Often times, the same team of experts serve on panels together. Borzelleca and Pariza, for example, have teamed up on more than 40 panels.</p>
<p>“It’s not a large universe of people,” said Steve Morris of the Government Accountability Office, which published a&nbsp;<a href="http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d10246.pdf">report</a>&nbsp;in 2010 that cited financial conflicts of interest in the GRAS system as a concern. “The fact that there’s ... repetition and there’s familiarity, that could potentially breed a conflict.”</p>
<p>The Center for Public Integrity’s analysis likely captures only a fraction of all expert panels convened to establish the GRAS status of additives. That’s because companies can make safety evaluations in secret, without ever telling the FDA. So it’s unclear in those cases whether an expert panel made the determinations.</p>
<p>Companies are allowed to hire a single consultant to sign off on safety determinations or rely&nbsp;on the judgment of their own experts — and did so about a third of the time, according to the Center for Public Integrity’s analysis.</p>
<p>In 2013, a Pew Charitable Trusts review of GRAS assessments concluded that “financial conflicts of interest were ubiquitous” in the system.</p>
<p>“The lack of independent review in GRAS determinations raises concerns about the integrity of the process and whether it ensures the safety of the food supply,” Pew researchers&nbsp;<a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23925593">concluded</a>.</p>
<p><strong>‘Sterling reputations, impeccable credentials’</strong></p>
<p>Industry consultants dispute such criticisms.</p>
<p>“There’s a reason you keep going back to the same people and that’s because these are people with sterling reputations, impeccable credentials and they know what they’re doing,” said James Heimbach, who has&nbsp;convened GRAS panels for decades. “If you need a quadruple bypass, do you want to go to somebody who’s already done a bunch of them or do you want to go to someone who’s never done one before?”</p>
<p>Indeed, most experts have decades of experience making GRAS determinations and maintain affiliations at universities. Panelists typically have extensive scientific backgrounds, often at the doctorate level, with years of experience in toxicology, pharmacology, organic chemistry and biochemistry.</p>
<p>Consultants interviewed for this story stressed that they would never sign off on an additive if it put public safety or their own professional reputations at risk.&nbsp;</p>
<p>George Burdock, the president and founder of Burdock Group Consultants,&nbsp;noted in an email that the experts who conduct GRAS assessments all have families who eat food.</p>
<p>“Would you approve anything you knew was not safe, knowing that your family might consume a product containing the ingredient?” he asked.</p>
<p>Some scientists say they’ve participated in panels that have been disbanded because the experts could not agree that the ingredient was GRAS for its intended use.</p>
<p>“If they don’t meet the criteria, they’re rejected,” said consultant A. Wallace Hayes, who has appeared on nine GRAS panels.</p>
<p>There are no public records documenting how often this happens, however.</p>
<p>Some additives that companies hope to market never even reach a panel. A couple of consultants told the Center for Public Integrity&nbsp;that they often conduct preliminary safety evaluations with companies to review ingredients before the company invests in a more comprehensive review with a panel of experts.</p>
<p>Robert McQuate, a former FDA regulator who co-founded the consulting firm GRAS Associates, says he sometimes flags safety problems during early screenings. He recalls doing so twice in the past few months.</p>
<p>“We’re going to do a rigorous safety evaluation,” McQuate said. “There’s no guarantee you’re going to get what you want.”</p>
<p><strong>Tobacco ties</strong></p>
<p>The Center for Public Integrity identified 10 GRAS panelists who have in the past had ties to the tobacco industry, including two who were once full-time employees of big tobacco companies, according to a review of tobacco industry documents archived by the University of California, San Francisco.</p>
<p>In interviews, some of these panelists said that their work for the tobacco industry was limited to evaluating the safety of cigarette additives or newly developed cigarette products that tobacco companies thought would be less dangerous. They stressed that they did not defend the safety of cigarettes in general.</p>
<p>Of the top 10 most frequently hired GRAS panelists, four have worked as consultants for tobacco companies.</p>
<p>Borzelleca’s work for the tobacco industry dates back at least to the early 1980s.</p>
<p>An RJ Reynolds&nbsp;<a href="http://legacy.library.ucsf.edu/tid/xym39d00/pdf?search=%22borzelleca%22">memo from 1984&nbsp;notes</a>&nbsp;that Borzelleca “has been secured by the tobacco industry to represent our position” during discussions with the Department of Health and Human Services about cigarette additives.</p>
<p>Two years later, the company envisioned Borzelleca as its “main spokesman” if a list of cigarette additives submitted to HHS were leaked to the press and “there is sustained and intense media coverage of ingredients issues,” according to a&nbsp;<a href="http://legacy.library.ucsf.edu/tid/lmq12a00/pdf?search=%22borzelleca%22">confidential memo</a>&nbsp;regarding the tobacco industry’s “public relations strategy.” &nbsp;</p>
<p>“My advice to the tobacco industry was that the GRAS substances they were using are safe when ingested,” Borzelleca wrote in an emailed response to Center for Public Integrity questions, “but I could not comment on their effects when they were subjected to the high temperatures of a lighted cigarette, a position that I still have.”</p>
<p>In 1995, Philip Morris&nbsp;<a href="http://legacy.library.ucsf.edu/tid/hds22d00/pdf?search=%22borzelleca%20phillip%20morris%22">hired</a>&nbsp;Borzelleca for $2,000 a day for consulting services “relative to all aspects of tobacco processing and cigarette manufacture and to hold himself available to serve as a member of the Philip Morris USA Scientific Advisory Board.”</p>
<p>Borzelleca said he became a member of Philip Morris’ Scientific Advisory Board “to advise PM on a less hazardous cigarette,” which he added was “erroneously referred to as a ‘safer cigarette.’ ”</p>
<p>However, he said he began donating his fees from his tobacco work to charity after officials from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, with which he was involved as an expert, expressed concerns about his ties to Philip Morris.</p>
<p>Borzelleca said he has not consulted with tobacco companies for at least three years.</p>
<p><strong>‘This is tobacco money’</strong></p>
<p>For a while, Borzelleca’s colleagues on the&nbsp;<a href="http://legacy.library.ucsf.edu/tid/pzg95c00/pdf?search=%22borzelleca%22">Philip Morris Scientific Advisory Board</a>&nbsp;included Pariza, Steve Taylor and William Waddell — scientists who are among the top 15 most contracted experts for safety assessments of ingredients added to food. Pariza and&nbsp;<a href="http://legacy.library.ucsf.edu/tid/ijk75c00/pdf?search=%22steve%20taylor%20nebraska%22">Taylor</a>&nbsp;were also retained separately as consultants for the company.</p>
<p>Taylor told the Center for Public Integrity&nbsp;that he consulted with the company on safety-related issues for some of the ingredients in tobacco products, but he declined to work on the safety of tobacco itself because he “considered it a dangerous product.” Pariza did not respond to requests for comment.</p>
<p>Some GRAS panelists did more than just consult for tobacco companies.</p>
<p>A. Wallace Hayes&nbsp;<a href="http://legacy.library.ucsf.edu/tid/huj01d00/pdf?search=%22wallace%20hayes%20tobacco%22">served as an executive</a>&nbsp;for RJR Nabisco, where he worked on both tobacco and food safety issues. A 1990&nbsp;<a href="http://legacy.library.ucsf.edu/tid/ixa04d00/pdf?search=%22a%20wallace%20hayes%22">performance record</a>&nbsp;said one of Hayes’ “objectives” was to “increase our knowledge base regarding the role of nicotine/cotinine in smoking enjoyment/satisfaction.”</p>
<p>“I only worked on RJ Reynolds’ attempts to develop a less hazardous, safe cigarette,” Hayes said. “I did not work on the traditional cigarette.”</p>
<p>Edward Carmines, who has participated in at least three GRAS panels, spent 13 years working as a scientist for Philip Morris. When contacted by phone and asked to discuss his work as a GRAS panelist, Carmines declined to comment and hung up.</p>
<p>Burdock Group Consultants is among the top five consulting firms hired by ingredient manufacturers for GRAS assessments. Burdock, the firm’s president, has participated in 10 expert panels since 1998.</p>
<p>While Burdock’s detailed&nbsp;<a href="http://www.burdockgroup.com/images/CVs/georgeburdockCV.pdf">résumé</a>&nbsp;notes his extensive experience assessing the safety of food and dietary supplements for companies and trade associations, nowhere does it mention&nbsp;that Philip Morris&nbsp;<a href="http://legacy.library.ucsf.edu/tid/jdb25j00/pdf?search=%22george%20burdock%22">routinely</a>&nbsp;<a href="http://legacy.library.ucsf.edu/tid/idb25j00/pdf?search=%22george%20burdock%22">hired</a>&nbsp;<a href="http://legacy.library.ucsf.edu/tid/vuk79e00/pdf?search=%22george%20burdock%22">him</a>&nbsp;as a scientific consultant in the 1990s and early 2000s.</p>
<p>On Aug. 22, 1995, Burdock received a check for nearly $16,000 from Philip Morris for his services. Underneath the amount,&nbsp;<a href="http://legacy.library.ucsf.edu/tid/nvk79e00/pdf?search=%22george%20burdock%22">the check states</a>: “This is tobacco money.”</p>
<p>When asked about his work for tobacco companies, Burdock replied in an email, “I cannot discuss any work I may have done with a client.”</p>
<p>Hayes, the former RJ Reynolds executive, said he “can see where people would have a problem” with former tobacco employees and consultants reviewing the safety of food additives. “But it’s all in the eyes of the beholder.”</p>
<p><strong>'The good, the bad and the ugly'</strong></p>
<p>Experts who serve on GRAS panels might think that they’re acting independently and making scientifically sound decisions, but that’s unlikely the case, says Sunita Sah, a Georgetown University business ethics professor who specializes in conflicts of interest.</p>
<p>Sah says many studies have shown that people’s judgment can be influenced by financial conflicts, even those involving as little as $5.</p>
<p>“For these scientists who are getting paid over and over again to do this, it’s very hard to remain totally impartial,” said Sah, who gave a presentation to industry consultants during a 2013 workshop about potential conflicts of interest in the GRAS system. “For something as important as what goes into somebody’s food, you want to eliminate those conflicts of interest.”</p>
<p>In 2010, the GAO recommended that the FDA “develop a strategy to minimize the potential for conflicts of interest in companies’ GRAS determinations.”</p>
<p>Five years later, the FDA says it’s still working on it.</p>
<p>Some industry consultants say they are open to the FDA creating guidelines to address concerns about conflicts of interest. But they worry that reforms could result in losing the most experienced expert panelists.</p>
<p>“It’s totally appropriate to investigate and refine and improve the processes with conflicts of interest,” McQuate said, “but let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater.”</p>
<p>Borzelleca, for his part, says he would prefer to see the FDA weed out unqualified experts with limited experience reviewing GRAS additives. He worries that some scientists “gloss over things” when conducting safety reviews.</p>
<p>“You do get the good, the bad and the ugly,” Borzelleca said, adding that he has refused to serve on panels with scientists who had never conducted a GRAS assessment before. “We need to have some policing here.”</p>
<p><strong><em>A version of this story was published with <a href="http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2015/04/17/400391693/how-the-food-industry-relies-on-scientists-with-big-tobacco-ties">NPR</a>.&nbsp;</em></strong></p>
Chris Younghttps://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/chris-youngErin Quinnhttps://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/erin-quinnWhy the FDA doesn't really know what's in your foodhttp://www.publicintegrity.org/node/17112The government has left it to companies to decide whether new food additives are safe.Massi2015-04-24T13:16:57-04:002015-04-14T05:00:00-04:00<p>Rebecca Fattell was enjoying breakfast at a hotel in Berlin last summer when, after a few bites of a roll, her mouth started to itch, her gums started to hurt and before long, hives covered her skin.</p>
<p>“My face, trunk, arms, legs,” Fattell said, “they were all beet red.”</p>
<p>She rushed to the emergency room.</p>
<p>Fattell, who is allergic to peanuts, is vigilant about what she eats and had been assured by hotel staff that her breakfast didn’t contain any. Hidden in the pastry, however, was lupin flour, which is made from a peanut-related legume that caused her reaction.</p>
<p>“I’m extremely careful,” said the 23-year-old New Yorker. “I just had no idea about lupin.”</p>
<p>Lupin is considered&nbsp;a "major&nbsp;food allergen"&nbsp;in Europe and must be labeled accordingly on packaged foods. In the United States, where lupin is less commonly used, there is no such requirement, leaving Fattell and others who suffer from peanut allergies vulnerable.</p>
<p>The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has known about lupin’s effects since at least 2008, but has made no move to require companies to identify it as an allergen on products sold in the United States.</p>
<p>Lupin is just one of thousands of ingredients companies have added to foods with little to no oversight from the FDA. They’ve taken advantage of a loophole in a decades-old law that allows them to deem an additive to be “generally recognized as safe” — or GRAS — without the agency’s blessing, or even its knowledge.</p>
<p>The loophole is so big that companies can market additives, like lupin, that the FDA has found to pose dangers. Even ingredients the agency has agreed&nbsp;are GRAS are now drawing scrutiny from scientists and consumer groups who dispute their safety.</p>
<p>Critics of the system say the biggest concern, however, is that companies regularly introduce new additives without ever informing the FDA. That means people are consuming foods with added flavors, preservatives and other ingredients that are not at all&nbsp;reviewed&nbsp;by regulators for immediate dangers or long-term health effects.</p>
<p><strong>‘Life threatening reactions’</strong></p>
<p>When George Weston Foods — an Australia-based food manufacturer — sought the FDA’s agreement that its lupin flour, protein and fiber were safe to add to breads, pastas and cereal in the United States, regulators feared it could trigger “life-threatening reactions” in peanut-allergic consumers.</p>
<p>The FDA said merely listing lupin on ingredient labels would not be enough warning. The ingredients, the regulators said, “failed to meet the standards for general recognition of safety,”&nbsp;according to documents obtained by the Natural Resources Defense Council through a Freedom of Information Act request.</p>
<p>George Weston withdrew its applications and decided not to sell the additives in the United States, its parent company said in an email to the Center for Public Integrity. Other companies do market them, however. Lupin, also spelled lupine, can be found as an additive in products on supermarket shelves today with no warning for people who suffer from peanut allergies.</p>
<p>The companies that make and supply these ingredients never had to seek the FDA’s opinion on safety, or even inform the agency that it was including lupin in products sold in the United States.</p>
<p>Rather than going through a painstaking FDA-led review process to ensure &nbsp;that their new ingredients are safe, food companies can determine on their own that substances are GRAS. &nbsp;</p>
<p>They can then ask the FDA to review their evaluation — if they wish. Or they can take their ingredients straight to market, without ever informing the agency.</p>
<p>"FDA doesn't know what it doesn't know," said Steve Morris of the Government Accountability Office, which published a report in 2010 that found that “FDA’s oversight process does not help ensure the safety of all new GRAS determinations.”</p>
<p>“It’s really clear that we have no basis to make almost any conclusions about the safety of the current food supply,” said Laura MacCleery, an attorney with the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a consumer advocacy group. “We don’t know what people are eating.”</p>
<p><strong>‘He was crying … He couldn’t breathe’</strong></p>
<p>Miles Bengco certainly didn’t know what he was eating when he chomped on a Quorn Turk’y Burger while watching a Los Angeles Lakers game with his family in 2013. Shortly after eating the burger, the 11-year-old started having trouble breathing.</p>
<p>“He started changing color. He turned purple and green, and then he went completely white,” his mother, Ann Marie Cote, remembered, tearing up as she relived that night. “He was crying&nbsp;… He couldn’t breathe."</p>
<p>By the time paramedics arrived to the house, Bengco was unresponsive and foaming at the mouth.</p>
<p>“I knew at that moment he was gone,” Cote said.</p>
<p>He died in a hospital the next day.</p>
<p><a href="http://cspinet.org/new/pdf/quorncomplaint1.pdf">In a lawsuit</a>&nbsp;filed last month, the boy’s parents blamed their son’s death on mycoprotein, a fungus-based ingredient used to make the burger Bengco ate. The lawsuit claims that their son, who had an allergy to mold, died after suffering “a severe anaphylactic reaction” caused by mycoprotein, which the family says was mislabeled on the package.</p>
<p>“It was a loaded gun in his mouth,” Cote said.</p>
<p>In a written response to reporters’ questions, Quorn stated, “we categorically reject the claims made by attorneys representing the Bengco family that our products were in any way associated with this unfortunate event.”</p>
<p>Quorn’s statement added that the company submitted all of its safety data on mycoprotein to the FDA years ago as part of an extensive agency review. The company said that the FDA had concluded that mycoprotein was safe&nbsp;but that “there would be a lengthy period before” the agency&nbsp;issued a formal decision.&nbsp;That's when&nbsp;Quorn decided to pursue an expedited GRAS review, according to the company’s written response.</p>
<p>The FDA did not respond to questions about Quorn's claims. But in 2002, it OK’d the GRAS status of mycoprotein for use in certain foods. Many consumer groups and scientists, however, dispute that the additive should be deemed safe.</p>
<p>Consumers have previously reported suffering a range of reactions after eating foods containing mycoprotein, including nausea and anaphylactic shock. The complaints prompted the Center for Science in the Public Interest&nbsp;to&nbsp;<a href="http://cspinet.org/new/pdf/quorn-letter-to-fda-nov-15-2011.pdf">urge the FDA</a>&nbsp;in 2011 to revoke the ingredient’s GRAS status.</p>
<p>GRAS ingredients are supposed to meet the same safety standard as food additives that undergo a full FDA review — a standard of “reasonable certainty” that no harm will result from consuming them.&nbsp;</p>
<p>For a company to determine that an ingredient is “generally recognized as safe,” it must establish that the additive’s safety is commonly understood by qualified scientific experts.</p>
<p>But&nbsp;some ingredients defy consensus, as consumers, scientific groups and sometimes even the FDA have pointed out. &nbsp;</p>
<p>Even GRAS additives that have been used in food for decades are now coming under fire as their uses expand and science doubting their safety emerges. For example, studies have found that carrageenan, widely used to provide a thick, creamy texture in foods like yogurt, ice cream and soy milk, can cause gastrointestinal inflammation in animals and humans.</p>
<p>The Cornucopia Institute, a Wisconsin-based nonprofit group, sent a letter to the acting&nbsp;FDA commissioner yesterday&nbsp;urging the agency to ban carrageenan as a food additive, an action the agency declined to take after a scientist made a similar request a few years ago.&nbsp;The group also sent the FDA a petition signed by&nbsp;nearly 39,000 individuals&nbsp;seeking&nbsp;the FDA to revoke the ingredient's GRAS status, including many who have blamed the ingredient for contributing to their digestive problems, including diarrhea and constipation.</p>
<p><strong>&nbsp;An industry-regulated system</strong></p>
<p>But it’s the ingredients unknown to the public&nbsp;that have critics of the GRAS system most worried.</p>
<p>Researchers for the Pew Charitable Trusts and Natural Resources Defense Council say that allowing companies to make safety determinations without telling the FDA makes it nearly impossible to identify whether there are health effects caused by long-term exposure to certain ingredients.</p>
<p>Their concerns are heightened because&nbsp;safety decisions often rest in the hands of a small group of scientific experts selected by companies or consulting firms with a financial incentive to get new ingredients on the market. Several of these scientists, a Center for Public Integrity investigation found, previously served as scientific consultants for tobacco companies during the 1980s and 1990s, when the tobacco industry fought vigorously to defend its products.</p>
<p>In many cases, researchers say companies are declaring ingredients to be safe without reporting the results of&nbsp;<a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0890623813003298">important toxicity tests</a>&nbsp;to prove it.</p>
<p>Even the Flavor and Extract Manufacturers Association,&nbsp;an industry trade group whose program for assessing the safety of flavor ingredients has been praised in the past,&nbsp;is now drawing increased scrutiny from critics who contend that the organization lacks transparency and approves additives using limited relevant public safety data.</p>
<p>“Congress had a clear understanding of what ‘generally recognized as safe’ means, but that’s not the understanding that basically prevailed,” said Scott Faber, vice president of government affairs for the Environmental Working Group, a nonprofit advocacy group seeking reforms to the GRAS system. “There are plenty of ingredients that are receiving GRAS status, the safety of which are in dispute.”</p>
<p><strong>An outdated law</strong></p>
<p>The GRAS loophole was born in 1958. Americans were growing concerned about the increased use of preservatives and other additives in food, so Congress passed — and President Dwight Eisenhower signed — the first law regulating ingredients added to food.</p>
<p>To restore confidence, the law set up a system requiring companies to submit new ingredients to an extensive FDA safety review before going to market.</p>
<p>But Congress didn’t want the FDA wasting time and resources approving common ingredients such as vinegar and table salt. So the law included an exemption to bypass the agency-led safety review process. Companies could prove on their own that ingredients are “generally recognized as safe.”&nbsp;</p>
<p>In the past five decades, the number of food additives has skyrocketed — from about 800 to more than 10,000. They are added to everything from baked goods and breakfast cereals to energy bars and carbonated drinks.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, the FDA’s food additive approval system has slowed to a crawl — the average review takes two years, but some drag on for decades. As a result, ingredient manufacturers have increasingly turned to the GRAS loophole as a quicker road to market.</p>
<p>“The food additive review process is a highway that is constantly gridlocked. If the food additive road doesn’t go anywhere, what do I do?” asked Stuart Pape, a Washington, D.C., attorney who consults for companies that manufacture food additives. “GRAS is the other pathway.”</p>
<p><strong>'It isn't the wild West'</strong></p>
<p>The FDA has publicly acknowledged the GRAS system’s shortcomings.</p>
<p>“We simply do not have the information to vouch for the safety of many of these chemicals,” Michael Taylor, the FDA’s Deputy Commissioner for Foods,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/food-additives-on-the-rise-as-fda-scrutiny-wanes/2014/08/17/828e9bf8-1cb2-11e4-ab7b-696c295ddfd1_story.html">told the&nbsp;<em>Washington Post</em></a>&nbsp;last year.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, industry scientists and lawyers contend that safety concerns are overblown and that major reforms designed to increase government oversight would cripple the resource-depleted FDA and stifle food innovation.</p>
<p>“It isn’t the Wild West out there,” said Stanley Tarka, a toxicologist and industry consultant. “We have the safest food supply in the world.”</p>
<p>George Burdock, the president and founder of a food safety consulting firm, says requiring extensive FDA oversight for GRAS additives would stall food innovation and result in additives taking years to get approval. The FDA, he says, “has enough on its plate already.”</p>
<p>The FDA is currently busy implementing The Food Safety Modernization Act, a sweeping&nbsp;<a href="http://www.fda.gov/Food/GuidanceRegulation/FSMA/">food safety reform bill</a>&nbsp;signed into law by President Barack Obama in 2011. The agency also prioritizes responding to foodborne illness crises like the&nbsp;<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2015/03/13/three-dead-in-listeria-outbreak-linked-to-blue-bell-ice-cream/">listeria outbreak</a>&nbsp;that killed three people in March.</p>
<p>Industry consultant James Heimbach says he’s confident in the quality and detail of GRAS determinations, whether or not the FDA reviews them.</p>
<p>“None of us wants to be responsible for putting something on the market that’s going to do harm,” Heimbach said.</p>
<p>“The potential for consumer harm is all based on theory or the possibility of some untoward actions by unscrupulous people,” Burdock added. “There has been no documented harm to a consumer as a result of a GRAS” additive.</p>
<p><strong>Trans fats</strong></p>
<p>But the issue is not just with ingredients that cause immediate harm. Since the FDA, scientists and consumers often don’t even know when new additives hit the market, it’s difficult to track their potential long-term health effects.</p>
<p>“What we’re talking about here is not generally things that poison people immediately,” said Erik Olson, the NRDC’s senior strategic director for health and food. “These are chemicals that may cause cancer, they may be endocrine disruptors, which means they disrupt the hormone system, or they can affect your reproduction or they can have effects on a fetus in utero.”</p>
<p>This has become clear in the case of one of the most known — and vilified — GRAS additives: partially hydrogenated oil, or trans fats. Used to keep foods fresh for long periods of time, trans fats are commonly found in products including fried foods, cake mixes and microwave popcorn. The ingredient has been named by public health experts as a contributor to heart disease, stroke and Type 2 diabetes.</p>
<p>Despite strong pushback from industry, the FDA is expected this summer to officially revoke the GRAS status of artificial trans fats.</p>
<p>Other additives have been deemed safe despite animal studies that have linked them to cancer. Methyl eugenol, for example, is considered a safe flavor ingredient even though a 2002 National Toxicology Program study concluded that “there was clear evidence of carcinogenic activity of methyl eugenol in male and female rats.”</p>
<p>Even green tea extracts known for their health benefits have drawn scrutiny from scientists who worry that, when highly purified and added to food, they could pose long-term health risks, including liver damage.</p>
<p>Last year, the FDA issued<a href="http://www.fda.gov/downloads/Food/GuidanceRegulation/GuidanceDocumentsRegulatoryInformation/IngredientsAdditivesGRASPackaging/UCM381316.pdf">&nbsp;guidance for industry</a>&nbsp;about the growing use of botanical ingredients and extracts in foods and beverages that are often touted as healthy.</p>
<p>“We are concerned that some of the novel substances that are being added to conventional foods, including beverages, may cause the food to be adulterated because these added substances may not be GRAS,” the FDA stated. The “trend raises questions regarding whether these new uses are unapproved food additive uses.”</p>
<p>“I’m sure there are things that are GRAS that are problematic,” said David Acheson, former chief medical officer at the FDA’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition who now heads a risk management firm that consults for food companies. “I’d put money on it that somewhere there’s abuse of the system.”</p>
<p><strong>‘Generally Recognized As Secret’</strong></p>
<p>If there is, it’s almost impossible for the FDA to police it.</p>
<p>Under today’s system, manufacturers that establish that an ingredient is safe for a specific use can either submit their safety evaluation to the FDA for a cursory review or keep their determination private. The FDA encourages companies to choose the former option, but companies more often choose the latter.</p>
<p>The NRDC estimates that about 1,000 ingredients have been added to food without FDA review since 1958. They dubbed the process “generally recognized as secret.”</p>
<p>Two industry consultants told Center for Public Integrity reporters that two-thirds of their safety reviews are never sent to regulators. An international food company told the GAO that it introduces five new ingredients yearly without telling the FDA.</p>
<p>The 2010 GAO report said the FDA should require companies to submit basic information from safety evaluations, including a substance’s identity and use.</p>
<p>But the FDA says requiring this information is beyond its power. “If we tried to make it mandatory,” said Dennis Keefe, director of the FDA's Office of Food Additive Safety, “we would be sued.”</p>
<p>Leaving regulators and the public in the dark means it’s nearly impossible to track how much exposure people have to some ingredients, NRDC researchers say.</p>
<p>Safety evaluations must legally “consider the cumulative effect from all probable sources,” said Tom Neltner, an attorney and chemical engineer who has co-authored many reports about the GRAS system for Pew and the NRDC. “And if you don’t know something’s there in food, how are you going to do an assessment?”</p>
<p>Consider how this could play out at a family’s breakfast table.</p>
<p>A company might privately conclude an ingredient is safe at a specific level in cereal. Another might do the same for its use in muffins. Ditto for a third company adding it to juices.</p>
<p>A family sitting down to a breakfast of all three foods could end up consuming much more of the ingredient than each company had anticipated.</p>
<p>“How can FDA fulfill its responsibility for protecting public health and safety of the food supply if they don’t even know all the chemicals that are being used in the food supply?” asked Lisa Lefferts, senior scientist at the Center for Science in the Public Interest.</p>
<p>In response to such concerns, the Grocery Manufacturers Association, a powerful food industry trade group,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.gmaonline.org/news-events/newsroom/grocery-manufacturer-association-announces-industry-initiative-on-ingredien/">announced</a>&nbsp;last year that it is working to increase transparency in the GRAS system by creating a database of safety determinations made by industry and making it available to the FDA.</p>
<p>The GMA, which also announced the establishment of the Center for Research on Ingredient Safety at Michigan State University, stated in an email response to reporters’ questions that industry is “committed to providing regulators and consumers with the important information they need about our products.”&nbsp;</p>
<p><strong>Caffeinated jelly beans</strong></p>
<p>Few ingredients demonstrate the FDA’s challenges in policing the GRAS system like caffeine.</p>
<p>While the FDA has long recognized the safety of caffeine at a certain level in cola-type beverages, companies have expanded that use to other products by making GRAS determinations on their own. In 2013, an FDA&nbsp;<a href="http://www.fda.gov/ForConsumers/ConsumerUpdates/ucm350570.htm">consumer update</a>&nbsp;stated that “existing rules never anticipated the current proliferation of caffeinated products.”</p>
<p>In recent years, companies have added caffeine to jelly beans, sunflower seeds and energy drinks. The FDA noted in its consumer update that energy drinks are “aggressively marketed” to young people, despite links to&nbsp;<a href="http://www.cspinet.org/new/201406251.html">deaths</a>&nbsp;and other adverse reactions.</p>
<p>The latest concerns about caffeine-infused products follows one of the GRAS system’s most high-profile controversies: alcoholic energy drinks, which the FDA banned in 2010 after public outcry.</p>
<p>In September 2010, Bo Rupp, a 15-year-old high school sophomore from Centreville, Virginia, drank two 23.5 oz. cans of Four Loko, a popular alcoholic energy drink.</p>
<p>During a concert that night, Rupp went “completely, intoxicatedly manic and wired,” said his family’s attorney Jeffrey Simon. Event staff had to call the boy’s parents to pick him up.</p>
<p>Rupp acted paranoid, according to his mother, Karla, who drove home with one hand on the wheel and the other arm holding back her son from jumping out of the moving car.</p>
<p>When they arrived home, Rupp ran out of the car to a busy highway where he reportedly sat down in the road. He was struck by a vehicle and airlifted to a nearby hospital. He died the next day.</p>
<p>Three months before he died, a panel of experts convened by industry-consultant Burdock’s firm concluded the alcoholic energy drink was safe. The manufacturer, Phusion Projects, had notified the FDA of their conclusion less than a year after 18 attorneys general<a href="http://www.fda.gov/downloads/Food/FoodIngredientsPackaging/UCM190371.pdf">&nbsp;told regulators</a>&nbsp;that they were concerned that caffeine-infused energy drinks like Four Loko were unsafe.</p>
<p>Some states like New York, Utah, Oklahoma, Michigan and Washington banned the sale of the beverages before the FDA acted. Two months after Rupp’s death, federal regulators told Phusion and three other companies that their products were unsafe, essentially banning them.</p>
<p>"While Phusion Projects does not comment on specific legal matters," the company said in a statement to the Center about the Rupp family's lawsuit, "it is important to remember that just because a lawsuit is filed does not mean it has merit."</p>
<p>Burdock declined to answer questions about caffeinated alcoholic drinks, stating in an email that he “can’t discuss client business.”</p>
<p>The story of caffeinated alcoholic beverages highlights the FDA’s limited ability to monitor many food additives. Because industry isn’t required to seek pre-market approval from the agency, the FDA is often left to police ingredients after they’ve already hit the market.</p>
<p>“Having pre-market authority, having people come to us and review what they plan to apply to the food supply is much more efficient for us,” the FDA’s Keefe said, adding that post-market reviews are resource intensive. “We strongly encourage them to come to us.”</p>
<p><strong>‘Sham’ regulations</strong></p>
<p>But even if companies heed Keefe’s advice, some critics say the agency has given itself little power to protect the public from potentially unsafe food additives.</p>
<p>James O’Reilly, a professor at the University of Cincinnati College of Law, says the FDA essentially abdicated its responsibility as a food regulator in 1997, when it proposed rules to streamline a more robust review process that had become backlogged. The rules, he says, are a “sham.”</p>
<p>The system the rules created, which still operates today, excuses the FDA from actually declaring ingredients are safe. Instead, when companies determine their ingredients are safe, and then seek FDA review of that determination, the agency’s response is simply that it has “no questions.” The regulators don’t disagree but they are not formally approving the substance as safe.</p>
<p>“It’s a balloon in the shape of a regulator,” said O’Reilly, who specializes in food and drug law. “We have the appearance that there’s a regulator protecting us, but there’s not.”</p>
<p>The FDA’s Keefe, however, stresses that the agency reviews are thorough.&nbsp;<a href="http://www.nrdc.org/food/files/chemicals-in-food-FOIA-Main.pdf">Documents showing correspondence</a>&nbsp;between regulators and industry officials confirm that the FDA asks tough questions.</p>
<p>But rarely does the agency reject a company’s GRAS determination. In fact, out of 524&nbsp;notifications that have been submitted to the FDA and received responses to date, the agency has only rejected 17.</p>
<p>Instead, companies often withdraw their notifications when regulators indicate flaws with the submissions. Sometimes companies re-submit their notifications and receive a “no questions” letter. But even if they don’t, they are still allowed to market their ingredients without one.</p>
<p>The agency does not publicly report why notices fail to earn a “no questions” letter. And because the FDA’s concerns are not published, as in the case of lupin, other companies may end up marketing potentially harmful additives without ever knowing that the agency may have disputed their safety.&nbsp;</p>
<p><strong>Marketing as 'FDA approved'</strong></p>
<p>Companies like to leave the impression that the FDA is on the case, however.</p>
<p>At the Institute of Food Technologists annual exposition in 2013, manufacturers gathered at the sprawling convention center in Chicago&nbsp;to learn about the latest trends in food innovation.&nbsp;</p>
<p>Among the hundreds of exhibitors, including big-name food producers and suppliers, Neltner and Maricel Maffini, a scientist who has co-authored several NRDC reports on food additives, remember watching ingredient manufacturers hawking their additives as “FDA approved” — “even though they are not actual approvals” by the agency, Neltner said.</p>
<p>Others advertised them as “approved by FDA procedures,” suggesting that the ingredients were reviewed by the agency even if they weren’t.</p>
<p>“Statements like that are misleading,” Maffini said.</p>
<p>In March 2014, Senomyx, a San Diego-based biotechnology company, published a press release that appeared to suggest that the FDA had signed off on the safety of its new flavor, Sweetmyx S617.</p>
<p>That was news to the agency.</p>
<p>“In fact,” the FDA&nbsp;<a href="http://www.fda.gov/food/newsevents/constituentupdates/ucm389065.htm">posted in a statement</a>&nbsp;on its website, “the agency had not made this determination nor had it been notified by Senomyx regarding a GRAS determination for this food ingredient.”</p>
<p>Senomyx later clarified that the safety evaluation was conducted by a flavor industry trade group, not the FDA.</p>
<p>Additive makers who want to supply their ingredients to big food companies — like General Mills, Kellogg and Kraft — have an incentive to go to the FDA for a safety review: It makes selling ingredients much easier.</p>
<p>“It provides an additional level of assurance for them that the rigorous GRAS evaluation process has been met,” said Robert McQuate, a former FDA regulator who co-founded a consulting firm that specializes in reviewing food additives. The big companies “can impose the requirement that if you as a supplier of an ingredient want to sell to the 800-pound gorillas … you also have to get it cleared through FDA.”</p>
<p>General Mills told the Center for Public Integrity that it requires its suppliers to submit their additives to the FDA for review.</p>
<p>Kellogg&nbsp;did not say whether it requires the same of its suppliers. Spokesman Kris Charles said in a statement: “We adhere to all regulations concerning food additives and have robust measures in place for evaluating new food ingredients."</p>
<p>Kraft did not respond to multiple requests for comment.</p>
<p>Bypassing FDA review is common, but industry consultants say it’s not a nefarious tactic designed to disguise unsafe food additives — it’s smart business.</p>
<p>They say companies often make GRAS determinations on their own — or through an industry trade association — as a way to protect proprietary information from competitors. After all, the FDA publishes information it receives when companies seek agency review, meaning competitors can steal ideas for using ingredients in new ways.</p>
<p>Secret GRAS determinations are done “to retain confidentiality of your material,” McQuate said. “It’s a competitive issue.”</p>
<p>But that explanation offers little comfort to critics who find it troubling that food additives are often regulated by companies with a financial incentive to market them, rather than a federal agency whose chief responsibility is to protect public health.</p>
<p>“Most people in this country take for granted that the Food and Drug Administration has some ability to oversee what ingredients are added to food and [that it] actually reviews the safety of those ingredients,” said David Andrews, a senior scientist at the Environmental Working Group. “It’s extremely disconcerting to find out that they don’t.”</p>
<p><strong><em>This story was co-published with&nbsp;<a href="http://www.pri.org/stories/2015-04-14/even-fda-has-no-idea-whats-food-you-eat-and-heres-why">PRI</a> and <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/04/14/fda-food-allergies_n_7061748.html?utm_hp_ref=politics">The Huffington Post</a>. A version of this story also appeared on <a href="http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2015/04/14/399591292/why-the-fda-is-clueless-about-some-of-the-additives-in-our-food">NPR</a>.&nbsp;</em></strong></p>
Erin Quinnhttps://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/erin-quinnChris Younghttps://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/chris-youngPR giant, oil industry group splithttp://www.publicintegrity.org/node/16801Edelman losing American Petroleum Institute because firm is spinning off its advertising subsidiary.Edelman;Julian Edelman2015-02-20T16:41:43-05:002015-02-20T16:41:17-05:00<p>Breakups are hard — especially when they mean losing contracts worth tens of millions of dollars a year.</p>
<p>Just ask Edelman.</p>
<p>Despite its status as the world’s largest public relations firm, Edelman and the American Petroleum Institute — the nation’s biggest oil and gas trade association — are about to<a href="http://www.holmesreport.com/latest/article/edelman's-american-petroleum-institute-assignment-set-to-end"> end their decade-long relationship</a>, according to the <em>Holmes Report</em>.</p>
<p>In January, the<a href="http://www.publicintegrity.org/2015/01/15/16596/who-needs-lobbyists-see-what-big-business-spends-win-american-minds"> Center for Public Integrity reported</a> that the PR giant earned a whopping $327.4 million from 2008-2012 in advertising and public relations contracts with the American Petroleum Institute. Details of the split aren’t yet clear.</p>
<p>But the <em>Holmes Report</em>, a trade journal, reported Thursday that Edelman’s advertising subsidiary — Blue Advertising — will be spinning off as an independent firm and taking along its advertising work for API.</p>
<p>In other words, Edelman is losing API mainly because the firm is losing part of itself.</p>
<p>Neither firm has issued a press release about the changes. Edelman declined to comment, and calls to API and Blue Advertising seeking comment were not immediately returned.</p>
<p>Edelman has not been one of API’s top five contractors for more than a year, according to tax filings. The trade group’s top contracts in 2013 included a $32.8 million advertising deal with Blue Advertising but no contracts with Edelman for public relations.</p>
<p>But API has not necessarily cut back on influencing the public. The oil lobby’s contracts with PR firm Fleishman Hillard grew from $4.8 million in 2011 to $23.9 million in 2013, according to annual tax filings.</p>
<p>This work has included print, TV, radio and digital media aimed at helping the petroleum group to “rebalance the conversation about the technique of hydraulic fracturing,” according to Fleishman Hillard’s <a href="http://fleishmanhillard.com/work/american-petroleum-institute/">website</a>.</p>
<p>It’s unclear yet whether Fleishman Hillard will stand to gain more work with API n this shift.</p>
<p>The firm is certainly no stranger to the energy industry. It has also been hired to promote corporation ConocoPhillips, the<a href="http://fleishmanhillard.com/work/rockies-express-pipeline-building-the-king-of-pipelines/"> Rockies Express Pipeline</a> — a 1,700-mile natural gas pipeline, and the<a href="http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2014/01/09/ottawa_hires_ad_firm_for_22_million_oilsands_campaign.html"> Canadian government</a> development of its oil sands.</p>
<p>Edelman, on the other hand, formally declared it would not accept clients that deny climate change following a <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/aug/04/worlds-top-pr-companies-rule-out-working-with-climate-deniers">botched response</a> to a survey and investigation by Climate Investigations Center and the Guardian about campaigns related to climate change.</p>
<p>The contracts between Edelman and API were by far the most lucrative deals inked between PR firms and trade associations from 2008 through 2012, according to the Center for Public Integrity’s <a href="http://www.publicintegrity.org/2015/01/16/16620/why-industry-trying-tell-you-how-think">recent investigation</a>.</p>
<p>But Edelman <a href="http://www.publicintegrity.org/2015/01/15/16595/industry-s-top-message-peddlers">wasn’t the only public relations firm</a> that earned big contracts with politically active business groups seeking to shape policy by influencing the public.</p>
<p>Goddard Gunster, for example, earned millions from the American Beverage Association in campaigns opposing sugary beverage taxes.</p>
Image of the&nbsp;American Petroleum Institute&nbsp;ad that appeared in Politico&nbsp;&nbsp;
Chris Younghttps://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/chris-youngErin Quinnhttps://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/erin-quinnWhy industry is trying to tell you how to thinkhttp://www.publicintegrity.org/node/16620How we investigated the top message peddlers influencing public policy — and why you should care.Lobbying in the United States;Political terminology;Lobbying;Military-industrial complex;Political law;Right to petition;Business ethics;Public relations;Trade association;American Beverage Association;Front organization;Center for Responsive Politics2015-01-17T09:08:21-05:002015-01-16T05:00:00-05:00<p>The nation’s most politically active trade associations appear to be more interested in lobbying the public than they are in lobbying lawmakers.&nbsp;</p>
<p>That’s the main takeaway from <a href="https://www.publicintegrity.org/2015/01/15/16596/who-needs-lobbyists-see-what-big-business-spends-win-american-minds">a new Center investigation</a> by Erin Quinn and Chris Young.</p>
<p>Trade groups like the American Petroleum Institute and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce spent more than $1.2 billion on contractors for advertising, public relations and marketing services from 2008 to 2012. That dwarfs what they spent on top lobbying contracts.</p>
<p>Erin Quinn and Chris Young spent more than six months investigating this story <a href="https://soundcloud.com/public-integrity/why-industry-is-trying-to-tell-you-how-to-think">and joined us for this podcast discussion</a>.</p>
<p><strong>Chris and Erin, isn’t this what trade associations are supposed to do?</strong></p>
<p><strong>Erin Quinn: </strong>This is what they’re supposed to do, we expect this. Trade groups are designed to advocate for policies that benefit their member companies. They play a major role in shaping public policy in the United States.&nbsp;</p>
<p><strong>Chris Young:</strong> But when most Americans think about the power trade groups wield, they think mainly about the work they do lobbying members of Congress. Much less attention is paid to how they use public relations and advertising to directly influence the public. So our investigation found that trade associations’ favorite top contractors were often PR and advertising agencies.</p>
<p><strong>Not lobbying firms.</strong>&nbsp;</p>
<p><strong>CY:</strong> Not lobbying firms, exactly. And that runs counter to what most people would think, when you look at the data.</p>
<p><strong>How is public relations more effective than lobbying when it comes to influencing public opinion?</strong></p>
<p><strong>CY:</strong> For one thing, PR and advertising fly under the radar. So unlike lobbying, they are not necessarily subject to the same federal disclosure rules that lobbyists have to abide by.</p>
<p><strong>EQ:</strong> So let’s say for example, a trade group is pushing for a specific piece of legislation that might not be so popular with the public. During the campaign for that, if there is no contact with a government official, they do not have to report who they hired to do that work. But on the other hand, lobbying firms report how much money they were paid, who their clients are, and what subject areas they cover in their work.&nbsp;</p>
<p><strong>CY:</strong> And aside from that, PR and advertising campaigns have a much broader impact. So they are typically much more expensive than lobbying contracts, but they have the potential to influence millions of Americans, who can then put pressure on lawmakers. Lobbyists’ influence, on the other hand, tends to be more limited in scope.</p>
<p><strong>So going to the public can be a better strategy than paying lobbyists?</strong></p>
<p><strong>EQ:</strong> Going to the public definitely acts as an effective complement to the lobbying. Public relations influences people to care about a topic and take action on it, whether that action is engaging in a letter-writing campaign, or calling your congressman or even starting some sort of group in support of it. This raises the profile of an issue. So that by the time the lobbying occurs, the lawmaker has probably already heard the arguments and they’re already familiar with the topic at hand.</p>
<p><strong>CY:</strong> And even beyond what Erin was just saying, these PR and advertising campaigns help refine industry’s lobbying efforts. One public relations expert actually told us that it “provides air cover” for lobbyists. What he means by that is that lobbyists’ job becomes a lot easier if they can point to polling numbers that were influenced by a successful PR or advertising campaign. So it’s a tool in the tool belt for a lobbyist to go in with that. So it’s not necessarily that public relations is replacing lobbying so much as it is that it’s enhancing it.&nbsp;</p>
<p><strong>So are you talking about ads you see on the subway? What are some recent examples of these kind of campaigns?</strong></p>
<p><strong>CY:</strong> The work that PR and advertising agencies do for these trade groups takes many different forms. Trade groups can hire firms to produce ads -- &nbsp;they can be print ads, they can be online, they can be on television. They can also conduct so-called “grassroots” campaigns that are designed to rally the public around a particular issue.&nbsp;</p>
<p><strong>EQ:</strong> And we say “so-called grassroots” because it’s not necessarily true grassroots that is driven by everyday people. But it’s rather manufactured to look that way.&nbsp;</p>
<p><strong>CY:</strong> So to give an example that some Americans, many Americans might be familiar with, the American Beverage Association over the past few years has been waging soda-tax fights across the country. With the help of PR firm Goddard Gunster, formerly Goddard Claussen, the trade association has created “front groups”, they’ve bought millions of dollars worth of ads in cities considering taxes on sugary drinks to try to fight them.</p>
<p><strong>EQ:</strong> And by front groups we mean organizations that are posing as an independent third party when really it’s backed by some sort of special interest.</p>
<p><strong>CY: </strong>That battle that I mentioned with the beverage taxes from the American Beverage Association, it played out most recently in California, in San Francisco and Berkeley, both those cities were asking voters whether they favored or opposed taxes on sugary drinks. On Election Day, voters in San Francisco rejected a soda-tax ballot measure, but a similar tax ended up passing in Berkeley.&nbsp;</p>
<p><strong>EQ:</strong> Another example that wasn’t necessarily focussed around a piece of legislation was a campaign that the American Petroleum Institute took on during the last presidential election. There were really contentious debates at the time around things like the Keystone XL Pipeline and how to deal with climate change. And the energy industry really wanted to make sure that they were represented well in those debates.</p>
<p>And so API along with their PR counsel Edelman created online groups called Energy Citizens and had an advertising campaign called “Vote For Energy”, and it was really a chance for oil and gas to polish its reputation before the election.&nbsp;</p>
<p><strong>Why did you both feel this was something important to investigate? Why does industry PR spending matter to voters?</strong></p>
<p><strong>EQ:</strong>&nbsp;The industries that we’re dealing with have major implications for public policy. And these are really high profile issues so it’s important for voters to know who is crafting the debates around these issues, and where the messages that they see are coming from.&nbsp;</p>
<p><strong>CY:</strong>&nbsp;And sometimes it can be hard for the public to know where these messages really are coming from. Erin can tell us a little bit more about an interesting example we found of a seemingly independent group created by the National Mining Association. Why don’t you tell us a little about "Count on Coal", Erin ...</p>
<p><strong>EQ:</strong>&nbsp;So "Count on Coal" is a group that claims to be this independent, citizen-driven grassroots campaign but people who come across their website or see their advertisements or their Facebook page can’t immediately tell who’s really behind the effort. "Count on Coal" is actually the product of a multi-million dollar contract between the National Mining Association and its PR firm.&nbsp;</p>
<p><strong>And how did you figure that out?</strong></p>
<p><strong>EQ:</strong>&nbsp;We actually found this on a tax return in what was maybe an accidental disclosure, where the National Mining Association in their 2012 tax return, listed under their top contractors the name of their PR firm which was Weber Merritt Strategies, and instead of listing the services, whether it was&nbsp;<em>PR</em>&nbsp;or&nbsp;<em>communications</em>, they actually wrote the name of the group, “Count on Coal”. So we knew this was manufactured by the PR firm and the National Mining Association.&nbsp;</p>
<p>And it wasn’t a small contract, it was worth $4 million&nbsp;</p>
<p><strong>So the grassroots coalition was actually an arm of the National Mining Association?</strong></p>
<p><strong>EQ:</strong>&nbsp;Exactly, it was not citizen-driven.</p>
<p><strong>So if industry groups aren’t using lobbying as much to influence public policy, how else are they doing it?&nbsp;</strong></p>
<p><strong>CY:</strong>&nbsp;So this is something that has been reported over the past few years. Media reports have noted that there has been a gradual decline in the amount of money special interests are putting into their lobbying efforts, and there has also been a drop in the total number of registered lobbyists.</p>
<p>So some observers who are watching this say this trend is likely the result of a shift toward so-called “soft-lobbying.” And that’s where trade groups and unions influence public policy through the use of academic think tanks, through nonprofit organizations, grassroots groups, all that aren’t subject to federal disclosure rules. These are all different ways to shape public policy without drawing too much scrutiny. &nbsp;&nbsp;</p>
<p><strong>Were you surprised by anything you found?</strong></p>
<p><strong>EQ:</strong>&nbsp;What we found most surprising I think was the sheer size of the contract between the American Petroleum Institute and their PR firm Edelman. It was the largest contract for each of the five years that we looked at. And the relationship totaled more than $327 million in&nbsp; five years. Other contracts we looked at didn’t even come close to this.&nbsp;</p>
<p><strong>CY:</strong>&nbsp;It was also interesting to see how the list of top contractors for some trade associations were sometimes dominated by PR and advertising firms. So for example in 2010 and 2012 -- both election years -- all five of the top contractors for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce were advertising agencies.</p>
<p><strong>EQ:&nbsp;</strong>And the American Chemistry Council was another example of a group that relied pretty heavily on public relations.</p>
<p><strong>CY:</strong>&nbsp;That’s right. In 2008, for example, the American Chemistry Council spent nearly $35 million on public relations services. All of their top contracts that year were for public relations.&nbsp;</p>
<p>During that year, they had a few different PR campaigns, but one was led by Ogilvy &amp; Mather and they helped defend the industry from bad press related to a group of chemicals that are&nbsp; found in plastics. These chemicals were suspected of causing a variety of health problems. The firm won a number of awards and praise for making the situation less problematic for the American Chemistry Council.</p>
<p><strong>Sounds like a job well done.&nbsp;</strong></p>
<p><strong>CY:&nbsp;</strong>Yeah I guess so.&nbsp;</p>
<p><strong>Not all industries are represented in your story, is that right? What’s missing, and why?</strong></p>
<p><strong>CY:&nbsp;</strong>That’s true. So we wanted to focus our analysis on the most politically active trade associations. So the trade groups that are really moving public policy.</p>
<p>So we only included the trade groups that spent at least $1 million on lobbying in 2012, and that’s according to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics. A total of 144 trade associations met that $1 million threshold, and these are the groups again that are most heavily involved in shaping public policy.&nbsp;</p>
<p><strong>So how did you dig up all of these numbers?</strong></p>
<p><strong>EQ:</strong>&nbsp;After we narrowed down our universe to the politically active trade associations that Chris just mentioned, our next step was to dig up their annual tax filings. These are publicly available, and on the documents they list their top 5 contractors who did some sort of outside work for them. And they list the names of the firms that they hired, the type of work that they did, and the cost of the contract for the given year.</p>
<p><strong>CY:</strong>&nbsp;And we collected and analyzed that data for all of these associations over a 5 year period. Our data starts in 2008. We started there because 2008 was the first year that trade groups were required to publicly report their top contractors. And the data runs through 2012, which is the most recent year for which data is available for pretty much every group. So there was a lot of data entry involved in this project as you can imagine.</p>
<p><strong>EQ:</strong>&nbsp;And when we finished the data entry, we were able to analyze based on the services that were done by the firms or the industries that the trade groups came from.&nbsp;</p>
<p><strong>Were you surprised that nobody wanted to talk to you on the record?</strong></p>
<p><strong>CY:</strong>&nbsp;Not necessarily. It is a bit ironic, that a lot of these PR firms wouldn’t talk, especially considering that these are highly skilled communicators who … these firms often boast about their communications savvy. But these relationships between trade associations and PR and advertising firms are sensitive in many cases, and the contracts are very lucrative. So there’s a lot at stake here. And because these campaigns often deal with controversial issues, it’s no surprise that trade groups and PR firms might want to keep quiet about their work.&nbsp;</p>
<p><strong>EQ:</strong>&nbsp;This is something I actually asked a PR expert about and he told me that often public relations is not about communicating something, but rather about not communicating something.</p>
<p><strong>So this story is part of your ongoing investigation that you call&nbsp;<a href="https://www.publicintegrity.org/politics/consider-source/misinformation-industry">the Misinformation Industry</a>. Tell me a bit about that.</strong></p>
<p><strong>CY:</strong>&nbsp;Sure, this is a relatively new project at the Center for Public Integrity and it’s part of our “Consider the Source” team. It’s intended to shed light on Washington’s political messaging industry essentially. So we’ll be taking a comprehensive look at how special interest groups gain public support for their political agendas, and sometimes that’s using misleading tactics like front groups like we talked about.</p>
<p><strong>EQ:</strong>&nbsp;Next up we’ll be looking at how this kind of work affects the food supply in this country.</p>
Erin Quinnhttps://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/erin-quinnChris Younghttps://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/chris-youngKimberley Porteoushttps://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/kimberley-porteousWho needs lobbyists? See what big business spends to win American mindshttp://www.publicintegrity.org/node/16596Trade groups pay top PR, advertising firms $1.2 billion over five years to influence public.Political terminology;Lobbying;Edelman;Business ethics;Public relations;Trade association;American Beverage Association;Communication design;WPP plc;APCO Worldwide;Advertising;Soda tax2015-01-17T09:08:21-05:002015-01-15T05:00:00-05:00<p>Forget lobbying. When Washington, D.C.’s biggest trade associations want to wield influence, they often put far more of their money into advertising and public relations, according to a new <a href="https://www.publicintegrity.org/">Center for Public Integrity</a> investigation.</p>
<p>Take, for example, the <a href="https://www.publicintegrity.org/news/American-Petroleum-Institute">American Petroleum Institute</a>. The oil and gas industry trade group spent more than $7 million lobbying federal officials in 2012. But that sum was dwarfed by the $85.5 million it paid to four public relations and advertising firms to, in effect, lobby the American public — including $51.9 million just to global PR giant Edelman.</p>
<p>From 2008 through 2012, annual tax filings show, the API paid Edelman a staggering $327.4 million for advertising and public relations services, more than any other contractor.&nbsp;</p>
<p>It’s been well-publicized how much industry spends on lobbying the government, but little is known about how much money goes toward influencing the public. In an effort to find out more, <a href="http://www.publicintegrity.org/">Center for Public Integrity</a> reporters examined the tax returns for trade associations that spent more than $1 million on lobbying in 2012. The IRS requires the groups to report their top five contractors.</p>
<p>Of $3.4 billion in contracts reported by the 144 trade groups from 2008 through 2012, more than $1.2 billion, or 37 percent, went toward advertising, public relations and marketing services, more than any other category. The second-highest total, $682.2 million, or 20 percent of the total, was directed toward legal, lobbying and government affairs.</p>
<p>By industry sector, the biggest clients of PR, marketing and ad services were energy and natural resources associations.</p>
<p>The public relations industry is on a growth tear while the number of federally registered lobbyists is actually shrinking. Public relations work, unlike lobbying, is not subject to federal disclosure rules, and PR and advertising campaigns can potentially influence a broader group of people. In addition to Edelman, among the other major players are President Barack Obama’s go-to ad agency GMMB, “issue-advocacy” firm Goddard Gunster and government policy specialists Apco Worldwide.</p>
<p>While not a complete accounting of spending, the analysis provides a glimpse into just how important the public relations industry is to groups seeking to influence public policy.</p>
<p><strong>Big energy leads spending</strong></p>
<p>Boosted by the $327.4 million-worth of contracts Edelman inked with the American Petroleum Institute — consistently the largest contracts the Center found in five years of collected data — the energy and natural resources industry outspent every other sector on advertising and public relations.</p>
<p>The API, Growth Energy — which represents ethanol producers — and other energy and natural resources trade groups collectively spent more than $430.5 million on PR and advertising to help burnish their image between 2008 and 2012.</p>
<p>It’s not clear how much of the total went into the bank accounts of the PR and advertising firms and how much was passed on to media companies. Edelman declined to comment with Center reporters for this story. Edelman likely left some of the work for the API to its Blue Advertising subsidiary, which&nbsp;<a href="http://www.blueadvertising.com/services/">offers media planning and placement</a>&nbsp;in its services and&nbsp;<a href="http://www.blueadvertising.com/american-petroleum-institute/">discloses</a>&nbsp;work for the oil giant on its website.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;</p>
<p>Other top energy and natural resources interests included the National Fisheries Institute, which represents seafood harvesters, wholesalers and retailers, and the National Biodiesel Board, whose members take recycled cooking oil and animal fats and turn them into fuel.</p>
<p>Business associations — led by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce — represented the second largest industry category, together paying PR and advertising firms at least $214.9 million from 2008 through 2012. The U.S. Chamber, the nation’s biggest lobby and a prolific spender on political ads, paid $173.5 million to its top advertising firms during the five-year period.</p>
<p>In 2010 and 2012, all five of the trade group’s top contractors were advertising agencies.</p>
<p>The U.S. Chamber paid Republican media-buying firm National Media Research, Planning &amp; Placement more than $60.8 million for advertising services in 2009 alone. National Media, based in Northern Virginia, researches voter demographics and behaviors and places ads in key media markets.</p>
<p>Another top advertising contractor for the U.S. Chamber was Revolution Agency, which the trade group paid more than $38.2 million from 2010 through 2012.</p>
<p>Revolution is a Northern Virginia-based advocacy firm that possesses the “Creativity of Madison Avenue” and the “Strategic Discipline of a Political Campaign,” according to its website. Its partners all formerly worked as staffers or consultants for Republican lawmakers, and the firm’s clients have included business groups and the telecommunications industry.</p>
<p>The agency was behind a&nbsp;<a href="http://www.revolution-agency.com/2010/cfpa-web1.php">public affairs campaign</a>&nbsp;targeting the proposed Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an agency birthed out of the 2008 financial crisis. The campaign on behalf of the U.S. Chamber included a&nbsp;<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zzVrURNdPss&amp;list=UUiCz8w_VYuGxsve-ZdbP8YQ">TV ad</a>&nbsp;that attacked the proposed bureau as a “massive new federal agency that will create more layers of regulation and bureaucracy.”</p>
<p>The finance, insurance and real estate sector ranked third in contracts with advertising and PR agencies, paying $184.5 million to contractors, including favorites the Most Organization, a West Coast advertising agency, and Locust Street Group, a “grassroots” advocacy firm. The sector was led by the National Association of Realtors and America’s Health Insurance Plans.</p>
<p>The Most Organization, based in Orange County, California, earned more than $116.7 million from 2010 through 2012 for its work to promote the National Association of Realtors in a national advertising campaign.</p>
<p>Fourth in PR spending based on top contracts was the food and beverage industry, which paid out $104.5 million from 2008-2012. Big spenders included the American Beverage Association, which has been shelling out millions to try and keep cities and states from taxing sugary drinks.</p>
<p>Rounding out the top five industries for PR and advertising spending was communications and electronics, led by CTIA — The Wireless Association, which represents telecommunications companies like AT&amp;T Inc. and Verizon Communications Co. Also in that category: the Software Alliance.</p>
<p>Steve Barrett, editor-in-chief of trade magazine PR Week, says it’s clear why trade associations rely so heavily on PR and advertising.</p>
<p>“They certainly want to influence the general public,” he says, “because the general public will then influence the politicians, the lawmakers or the regulators in that particular industry.”</p>
<p><strong>Edelman leads PR firms</strong></p>
<p>The Center for Public Integrity’s analysis includes the top five contractors for each trade association. Annual totals need to be at least $100,000 to be reported. The Center for Public Integrity looked only at trade associations that spent more than $1 million on lobbying in 2012, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. [See <a href="https://www.publicintegrity.org/2015/01/14/16606/methodology">Methodology</a>.]</p>
<p>Edelman’s lucrative contracts with the American Petroleum Institute helped the PR giant earn $346.8 million, significantly more money from top trade associations than any other advertising or public relations firm, according to the Center for Public Integrity’s analysis. But the oil industry trade group wasn’t the firm’s only client.</p>
<p>Others included the Business Roundtable ($9.9 million), a group of CEOs who advocate for business-friendly policies, the Software Alliance ($2.5 million) and the Grocery Manufacturers Association ($1.8 million).</p>
<p>The food-industry trade group paid Edelman more than $1 million in 2011 for work related to its campaign to put select nutrition facts on labels — a move that some health experts&nbsp;<a href="http://www.foodpolitics.com/2011/01/singing-kumbaya-gmafmi-displays-preemptive-label-design/">criticized</a>&nbsp;as a way to head off the Food and Drug Administration’s effort to require more comprehensive labeling.</p>
<p>Edelman is the country’s largest independent public relations firm. It employs more than 5,000 workers and maintains subsidiaries that specialize in&nbsp;<a href="http://grassroots.com/">grassroots communications</a>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<a href="http://www.edelman.com/specialty/blue-advertising/">advertising</a>.</p>
<p>The firm’s Washington office has a staff of 225, which includes “former journalists, campaign veterans, political speechwriters, White House staffers and legislative aides,” according to the firm’s website. Among them:&nbsp;<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/10/fashion/steve-schmidt-a-career-resurrected-after-mccain-and-palin.html?pagewanted=all">Steve Schmidt</a>, a senior adviser to Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign; former White House deputy press secretary&nbsp;<a href="http://www.edelman.com/news/edelman-bolsters-public-affairs-team-by-adding-former-senior-white-house-and-senate-staffers/">Jamie Smith</a>; and&nbsp;<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/in-the-loop/wp/2014/07/24/former-senators-gregg-and-conrad-land-same-job/">former Sens.</a>&nbsp;Judd Gregg, R-N.H., and Kent Conrad, D-N.D.</p>
<p>Edelman is known for its at-times controversial tactics. In 2006, the firm was forced to&nbsp;<a href="http://www.edelman.com/p/6-a-m/a-commitment/">apologize</a>&nbsp;for creating a&nbsp;<a href="http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2006-10-09/wal-marts-jim-and-laura-the-real-storybusinessweek-business-news-stock-market-and-financial-advice">misleading grassroots campaign</a>&nbsp;for Wal-Mart. To polish the company’s reputation, the agency had created “Working Families for Wal-Mart,” for which a couple drove across the country blogging positive accounts of the retail giant’s employees and customers — initially without disclosing that they were compensated. The campaign, which launched amid bad press about the company’s employment practices, sought to portray Wal-Mart workers as happy middle-class families.</p>
<p>More recently,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/nov/18/revealed-keystone-companys-pr-blitz-to-safeguard-its-backup-plan">leaked documents</a>&nbsp;revealed Edelman’s aggressive plans to attack opponents of a pipeline being developed by TransCanada Corp. Within days of the leak, TransCanada&nbsp;<a href="http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/transcanada-cuts-ties-with-u-s-public-relations-firm-edelman-1.2851118">announced</a>&nbsp;that it was severing ties with Edelman.&nbsp;</p>
<p>In both cases, according to reports and leaked documents, Edelman maintained the same three-step approach: promote positive messages, respond to criticism and pressure opposition groups.</p>
<p>Michael Bush, a spokesman for the firm, declined to comment for this story. In an email, he wrote, “We do not talk about the work we do for clients.”</p>
<p>Public relations and advertising agencies boast of their communications savvy, but firms contacted for this story were mum. Some, like Edelman, declined to comment, while others did not return repeated phone calls and emails seeking comment.</p>
<p>Most trade associations also did not respond to the Center for Public Integrity’s inquiries.</p>
<p>Lisa Graves, executive director of liberal watchdog group the Center for Media and Democracy, which operates the website&nbsp;<a href="http://www.prwatch.org/">PRWatch.org</a>, says trade associations are designed to be a “shield and a sword” for their corporate members.</p>
<p>“It’s important for people to know more about how the trade associations operate and which PR operations they’re funding,” she says, “because those nonprofit entities are extremely powerful special interests in Washington, D.C.”</p>
<p><strong>‘Turning the tide’</strong></p>
<p>Communications firm GMMB ranked second behind Edelman. The agency, which has offices in Washington, D.C., and Seattle, brought in $123.5 million from contracts with five different associations in the beverage, communications, transportation and business industries from 2008 through 2012.</p>
<p>Known most prominently for its political work on behalf of Barack Obama’s&nbsp;<a href="http://www.gmmb.com/work/view/president-barack-obama/">presidential campaigns</a>&nbsp;— GMMB’s leadership team includes Obama’s campaign advisor Jim Margolis — the firm has created ad blitzes for trade groups including CTIA and the American Beverage Association, whose members include Coca-Cola and PepsiCo.</p>
<p>From 2009 through 2012, the wireless association paid GMMB $40.5 million to produce ads, including one&nbsp;<a href="http://www.gmmb.com/news/view/explore-your-wireless-mind-with-ctia-the-wireless-association">TV spot</a>&nbsp;with the message that “wireless is freedom.” The beverage association, which teamed up with GMMB on a 2012&nbsp;<a href="http://vimeo.com/38380633">ad campaign</a>&nbsp;to promote new prominently displayed calorie labels, paid the firm more than $55.2 million.</p>
<p>The Most Organization and National Media Research, Planning and Placement were the third- and fourth-highest paid contractors for advertising and public relations services. Goddard Claussen (now Goddard Gunster) came in fifth, followed by Revolution Agency, which was sixth, thanks mostly to its work for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, according to the Center for Public Integrity’s data analysis.</p>
<p>Apco Worldwide, which ranked seventh, earned $42.9 million from trade associations. The Washington, D.C.-based firm is known for its work for the&nbsp;<a href="http://www.ucsusa.org/sites/default/files/legacy/assets/documents/global_warming/exxon-appC-part02.pdf">tobacco</a>&nbsp;and health care industries. Mike Tuffin, a managing director in the firm’s Washington office, joined Apco in 2012 after serving as executive vice president of America’s Health Insurance Plans, a trade group that represents health insurers.</p>
<p>On behalf of AHIP, the agency created&nbsp;<a href="http://www.publicintegrity.org/2011/04/11/4050/analysis-front-group-hall-shame">front group</a>&nbsp;Health Care America to attack filmmaker Michael Moore’s 2007 documentary <em>Sicko</em>, which demonized American health insurers, according to&nbsp;<a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/wendell-potter/my-apologies-to-michael-m_b_786902.html">Wendell Potter</a>, a former industry-executive-turned-whistleblower. (Disclosure: Potter is a regular columnist for the Center for Public Integrity.)</p>
<p>In the two years before Congress passed health care reform in 2010, Apco won at least two contracts with AHIP, totaling more than $5 million.</p>
<p>Among former government officials at Apco are ex-Gov.&nbsp;<a href="http://www.billrichardson.com/about-bill/biography">Bill Richardson</a>, D-N.M., and ex-Reps.&nbsp;<a href="http://harpers.org/blog/2007/10/bonkers-for-apco/">Don Bonker</a>, D-Wash., and&nbsp;<a href="http://www.rollcall.com/news/tim_roemer_joins_apco_worldwide_leaves_door_open_to_future_run-210948-1.html">Tim Roemer</a>, D-Ind.</p>
<p>Ogilvy &amp; Mather came in just behind Apco, earning nearly $41 million from four trade associations during the five-year period reviewed by the Center for Public Integrity. But the firm, a subsidiary of communications giant WPP, earned almost all of its money from the&nbsp;<a href="http://www.publicintegrity.org/news/American-Chemistry-Council">American Chemistry Council</a>, which represents chemical companies.</p>
<p>The American Chemistry Council paid Ogilvy more than $15 million in 2008 alone. That year, the firm led a couple of PR and advertising campaigns on behalf of the trade group, including one that discouraged Americans from supporting a ban on products containing phthalates, a group of chemicals found in plastics and suspected of causing changes in hormone levels, birth defects and other health effects.</p>
<p>The firm earned awards for the phthalates campaign, which it dubbed “From Toxic to Truthful: Turning the Tide on Phthalates.” Even though Congress&nbsp;<a href="http://abcnews.go.com/WN/story?id=5474936">eventually banned</a>&nbsp;the use of certain types of phthalates in children’s toys, the firm&nbsp;<a href="http://www.wpp.com/wppedcream/2009/pr/pr_004.html">patted itself on the back</a>&nbsp;for helping to “neutralize negative coverage” and bring “a noticeable shift in the public mood.”</p>
<p>FleishmanHillard ranked ninth, according to the Center’s analysis. Its public relations and advertising clients included the American Petroleum Institute ($27.6 million) and CropLife America ($1.5 million), which represents the manufacturers of pesticides and agricultural chemicals.</p>
<p>The firm, which&nbsp;<a href="http://fleishmanhillard.com/about/">describes itself</a>&nbsp;as being driven by “the power of true,” has consistently ranked within the top three of the world’s highest-paid public relations companies for the past five years, according to&nbsp;<a href="http://worldreport.holmesreport.com/top-250">the World PR Report</a>&nbsp;published by the Holmes Report. Its D.C. office is led by Kris Balderston, a former State Department official and deputy assistant to former President Bill Clinton.</p>
<p>Keeping the players straight in the advertising and public relations game is no easy task due to a series of massive mergers that have taken place over the past decade or so. GMMB, for example, is actually a subsidiary of FleishmanHillard, which is owned by the giant advertising and communications holding company Omnicom Media Group, based in New York City.</p>
<p>But most of the subsidiaries function under their own names.</p>
<p>Locust Street Group rounds out the top 10 firms for PR and advertising services. The Washington, D.C.-based agency earned $23.6 million in trade group money from 2008 through 2012, almost all of which came from America’s Health Insurance Plans. It’s unclear what exactly the agency did on the insurance group’s behalf — the firm’s founder, David Barnhart, declined to answer questions for this story — but Locust Street Group’s&nbsp;<a href="http://www.locuststreet.com/what-we-do">website</a>&nbsp;says it builds “boots on the ground” coalitions and creates social media campaigns to help influence lawmakers.</p>
<p>“D.C. may have K Street with tons of lobbyists,” the firm’s slogan says, “but small towns all over America have a Locust Street.”</p>
<p><strong>High stakes, big reward</strong></p>
<p>For public relations agencies, landing a contract with a large trade association is a big deal.</p>
<p>“The stakes are high, and the competition is intense,” says Larry Parnell, director of George Washington University’s master’s program in strategic public relations. “But as you can see, winning one of these things is very lucrative.”</p>
<p>It’s difficult to draw sweeping conclusions from the data analyzed by the Center. Trade groups often vaguely describe the services their top contractors provide as “professional fees” or “consulting.” Many firms offer a wide range of services, at times making it unclear exactly what kind of work was done on the industry associations’ behalf.</p>
<p>Because the Center for Public Integrity only reviewed the most politically active trade associations, the data didn’t include some industry groups that fell below the $1 million lobbying threshold but still spent heavily on public relations and advertising.</p>
<p>But the contractor information provides an inside look at the way trade associations use PR and advertising to ply the American mind. Trade groups determined to fight regulations and boost profits of their members have spent heavily to influence how the public perceives policies that affect everything from the air we breathe to the beverages we drink.</p>
<p>The strategy, public relations experts say, is not designed to replace lobbying so much as it is to enhance it.</p>
<p>“You can leverage [public relations work] so your lobbying is to a finer point,” says Parnell, noting that lobbyists can better influence lawmakers by showing them polling gathered by “grassroots” PR campaigns. “It provides air cover.”</p>
<p>“People and organizations are getting increasingly sophisticated with their communications strategies. They are more multi-dimensional,” adds Anne Kolton, vice president of communications for the American Chemistry Council. “With any advocacy [effort], the key is to create an echo chamber so people hear your message in numerous venues.”</p>
<p>There are some advantages to putting millions into PR rather than lobbying. For example, a trade association may be pushing a particular policy that is not so popular with the public. As long as it doesn’t directly contact a government official, it need not report who it has hired to do the PR work. Lobbying firms generally must report how much they are paid, who their clients are and what subject areas they are working on.</p>
<p><strong>Misleading tactics</strong></p>
<p>PR agencies may further obfuscate their role by creating so-called “front groups” that appear to be grassroots organizations, in an effort to push their clients’ messages. It is often difficult to discern who is behind these manufactured entities, though sometimes information can trickle through.</p>
<p>For example, the tax form for the National Mining Association showed that it paid $4 million to Weber Merritt, a Northern Virginia public affairs firm, as an independent contractor. The services were listed as “Count on Coal” in 2012, according to IRS filings.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.countoncoal.org/">Count on Coal</a>&nbsp;calls itself a "grassroots organization" that educates people on coal-powered electricity. Its social media and online petitions, which criticize government proposals to cut carbon emissions, all omit ties to the mining association.</p>
<p>While this type of “grassroots” mobilization is increasingly driven by an industry or paid consultants, it is only one piece of the growing demand for communications professionals, who specialize in everything from crisis management to social media advocacy.</p>
<p>In 2013, the global public relations industry grew 11 percent over the previous year to $12.5 billion, according to trade journal&nbsp;<a href="http://worldreport.holmesreport.com/">The Holmes Report</a>.</p>
<p>The steady rise in public relations worldwide spending has been accompanied by an overall drop in lobbying spending, beyond the trade group sector.</p>
<p>Lobbying expenditures peaked in 2010, when special interests spent $3.6 billion on lobbying federal lawmakers. Since then, they have declined steadily, falling to $3.2 billion in 2013,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/">according to the Center for Responsive Politics</a>. The total number of registered lobbyists has also dropped.</p>
<p>Some say the change indicates a shift toward so-called “<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2014/08/19/spending-on-lobbying-is-actually-falling-or-is-it/">soft lobbying</a>,” a strategy that enables industry groups and unions to influence public policy not only with public relations, but through think tanks, nonprofit organizations and grassroots groups that aren’t subject to federal disclosure rules.</p>
<p><strong>Journalists overwhelmed</strong></p>
<p>The golden age for PR has coincided with the decline of mainstream journalism, especially newspapers, which have suffered from plummeting ad revenue that has necessitated layoffs in newsrooms across the country.</p>
<p>Today, not only are PR professionals outnumbering journalists by a ratio of 4.6 to 1, but the salary gap between the two occupations has grown to almost $20,000 per year, according to&nbsp;<a href="http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/08/11/the-growing-pay-gap-between-journalism-and-public-relations/">the Pew Research Center</a>. The widening employment and income disparities have left journalists underpaid, overworked and increasingly unable to undertake independent, in-depth reporting.</p>
<p>Rick Edmonds, a writer for the Poynter Institute who covers the business of journalism, says the shift has been particularly evident in the coverage of science and health news. Many news organizations that once reported extensively on those issues no longer have the resources to cover them adequately, and special interests have filled the void.</p>
<p>“A great deal of science and health news is coming from the PR side,” Edmonds says.</p>
<p>For trade associations like the American Petroleum Institute, that’s part of the larger public relations strategy that makes lobbying federal lawmakers a lot easier.</p>
<p>“If we’re concerned about a particular member [of Congress], we will educate that constituency and encourage people to weigh in with their elected official,” Jack Gerard, the American Petroleum Institute’s president and CEO,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/jack-gerard-the-force-majeure-behind-big-oil/2012/04/06/gIQA1hjC0S_story.html">told The Washington Post</a>&nbsp;in a 2012 interview explaining the mentality behind the trade group’s PR offensive. “Congress is a lagging indicator. Congress is responsive to the American people. That’s why a well-educated electorate is a key to sound policy.”</p>
<p>The gradual shift from a focus on traditional lobbying toward greater use of the “outside game of politics,” or communications like PR, has been going on for at least a decade, close observers say, but is now accelerating with advances in technology, social media and digital strategies, says Doug Pinkham, president of the Public Affairs Council, an association of public affairs professionals who specialize in corporate PR, lobbying and grassroots advocacy.</p>
<p>Not all of the trade associations reviewed by the Center for Public Integrity spent more money on top contracts for public relations and advertising than on those for lobbying and legal services. But the data appear to support broader trends in the so-called “influence industry.”</p>
<p>“In the world we live in now,” says Pinkham, “if you have an issue that is visual and has a compelling narrative, we’re better off spending more resources on trying to educate the public” than relying on traditional lobbying.</p>
<p><strong>Troubled industries turn to PR</strong></p>
<p>The trade associations that rely most on PR and advertising campaigns are usually those representing industries facing the heaviest regulation and the most public contempt, says Edward Walker, a sociology professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and author of the book <em>Grassroots for Hire</em>.</p>
<p>And the campaigns are often tied to specific public policy crises. As Walker says, they usually launch “when industries really feel threatened that they might actually lose a policy battle.”</p>
<p>Over the last few years, both the American Petroleum Institute and the American Beverage Association have used PR campaigns to defend their respective industries during heated debates over issues like the proposed Keystone XL pipeline and proposed taxes on sugary drinks.</p>
<p>At the outset of 2012, the American Petroleum Institute announced a “Vote4Energy” campaign to promote the industry in a contentious election year. Its social media endorsed the idea that domestic oil production would bring jobs, revenue and national security.</p>
<p>With Edelman’s help, the American Petroleum Institute also organized a speech and panel discussion targeting “key influencers” in attendance, including think tanks, government officials and the media. Online groups also emerged, like “Energy Tomorrow,” which hosts a blog by Mark Green, a journalist-turned-industry-blogger.</p>
<p>In addition to Edelman’s work, the petroleum group paid FleishmanHillard $22.8 million in 2012 for advertising to promote hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, to skeptical citizens. TV advertisements targeted a half-dozen shale gas-producing states, including Pennsylvania, Texas and North Dakota, emphasizing small-town reliance on energy and downplaying environmental impacts, as part of its Energy from Shale campaign.</p>
<p><strong>Big soda</strong></p>
<p>Few industries have felt more threatened in recent years than soda makers.</p>
<p>Since 2009, the makers of sugary beverages have found themselves under attack from government officials and public health advocates who have blamed soft drinks for the nation’s expanding waistlines and have favored taxing popular sweetened beverages.</p>
<p>The American Beverage Association has fought back — vigorously — with the help of Goddard Gunster, a Washington, D.C.-based firm famous for creating the “Harry and Louise” ad campaign that helped bury President Clinton’s health care reform proposal in 1993 and 1994.</p>
<p>Goddard has produced&nbsp;<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJTVbUtYLbw&amp;feature=youtu.be">anti-tax ads</a>&nbsp;and created front groups in cities and states considering soda taxes. In 2012, the firm helped the association defeat two soda-tax ballot measures in Richmond and El Monte, California — campaigns that preceded its 2014 ballot-box battles in San Francisco, where voters rejected a soda-tax measure, and Berkeley, where a sugary-drink tax passed.</p>
<p>Jenny Wang, a public health worker and mother of two girls, recalls how the beverage industry flooded Richmond with anti-tax ads, buying up the town’s billboards and hiring residents to deliver mailers door-to-door.</p>
<p>“We didn’t have the manpower to fight against all of that messaging,” says Wang, a former Richmond resident who supported the soda tax. “They were so pervasive and so persuasive.”</p>
<p><em>John Dunbar contributed to this report.</em></p>
Screenshot from an ad, paid for by the American Petroleum Institute, which was part of a "Vote 4 Energy" campaign from 2012.
Erin Quinnhttps://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/erin-quinnChris Younghttps://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/chris-youngKoch-funded think tank offers schools course in libertarianismhttp://www.publicintegrity.org/node/15387Koch-backed think tank wants to educate young minds on the benefits of the free-market system.Conservatism in the United States;Political philosophy;Koch family foundations;Political activities of the Koch brothers;Libertarianism2014-09-11T17:13:42-04:002014-08-26T05:00:00-04:00<p>Pop quiz, teachers: Would you like to inject a strong dose of libertarianism into the curriculum you take back to school this fall?</p>
<p>If you answered yes, then a Koch-funded think tank has exactly what you need. And it won’t cost you or your school a penny.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.theedvantage.org/about">The EDvantage</a>, a project of the libertarian <a href="https://www.theihs.org/">Institute for Humane Studies</a>, bills itself as an online “curriculum hub for pioneering educators.”</p>
<p>The website offers high school teachers and college professors educational videos, articles and podcasts on topics including economics, history and philosophy. But as people might expect from a think tank whose board is chaired by billionaire libertarian Charles Koch, most of the project’s economics content features two common themes: vilify government, promote the free market.</p>
<p>For example, teachers using EDvantage can find economics videos explaining how the Environmental Protection Agency is <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fxhk4FuU0YQ">bad for the environment</a>, how sweatshops are <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2sW2wt3nLU#t=28">good for third-world workers</a> and how the minimum wage <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=siW0YAAfX6I">costs workers jobs</a>. Content featuring opposing viewpoints, however, is sparse.</p>
<p>“The minimum wage is supposed to help the poorer, less-skilled and younger workers in the economy,” says the narrator in “The Truth About the Minimum Wage,” a video produced by the libertarian <a href="http://www.fee.org/about/">Foundation for Economic Education</a> and featured on EDvantage. “But it doesn’t. It gets them fired.”</p>
<p>According to its website, EDvantage is funded by the John Templeton Foundation, whose core funding areas include “<a href="http://www.templeton.org/what-we-fund/core-funding-areas/individual-freedom-free-markets">individual freedom and free markets</a>.”</p>
<p>Program director Daniel Green said through a foundation spokeswoman that the two-year, $739,000 grant is meant “to further Sir John Templeton’s objective of supporting education about the enhancement of individual freedom and free markets.” In addition to funding free-market initiatives, the foundation — founded by the billionaire global investor and mutual fund pioneer — supports a variety of other causes, including ones related to science and religion.&nbsp;&nbsp;</p>
<p>The Institute for Humane Studies, which is housed at George Mason University in Arlington, Virginia, is funded largely by billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch. The think tank, whose mission is to advance “a freer society,” received $12.4 million from the Charles Koch Charitable Foundation from 2008 to 2012, according to annual tax documents.</p>
<p>The Koch brothers appear to be on a mission to spread their libertarian message to high school and college students. In July, The Huffington Post published a <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/07/16/koch-brothers-education_n_5587577.html">story</a> headlined, “Koch High: How The Koch Brothers Are Buying Their Way Into The Minds Of Public School Students,” which detailed how a Koch-run nonprofit called Youth Entrepreneurs is recruiting teachers and crafting curricula favorable to the Koch’s political agenda.</p>
<p>And as the Center for Public Integrity <a href="http://www.publicintegrity.org/2014/03/27/14497/inside-koch-brothers-campus-crusade">reported</a> in March, two of the six private charitable foundations the Koch brothers control and personally fund combined in 2012 to pump more than $12.7 million into colleges and universities.</p>
<p>The EDvantage officially launched last October, but this is the first time it will be available to teachers for the beginning of a school year.</p>
<p>It is unclear how many teachers and professors have used EDvantage. Scott Barton, a director of the project, declined to be interviewed for this story. In an emailed statement, he wrote that “Resources are curated with the help of our academic editorial board to present ideas from diverse ideological perspectives.”</p>
<p>But teachers who use EDvantage won’t find much ideological balance while researching content on the website’s economics pages. The educational materials selected by EDvantage for economics lessons are overwhelmingly anti-government and pro-free market.</p>
<p>For example, a page of videos and articles on <a href="http://www.theedvantage.org/economics/regulations">economic regulations</a> includes videos that <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jr8qHv4hCVw#t=68">lament occupational licensing laws</a>, explain how <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBf-tcC5dLM">regulations are burdening food truck owners</a> and argue that <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DvxT7fryE3Q">free markets regulate product safety better than the government</a>.</p>
<p>Content found on pages about <a href="http://www.theedvantage.org/economics/fiscal-policy">fiscal policy</a>, <a href="http://www.theedvantage.org/economics/entrepreneurship">entrepreneurship</a> and <a href="http://www.theedvantage.org/economics/price-controls">price controls</a> is similarly dominated by libertarian perspectives critical of government regulation.</p>
<p>The videos offered on the website are often clever, funny and well-produced. Many videos are produced by&nbsp;<a href="http://www.learnliberty.org/about/">Learn Liberty</a>, a separate project of the Institute for Humane Studies that calls itself “a resource for learning about the ideas of a free society.”</p>
<p>One animated Learn Liberty video, titled “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tv-6YpUzQdA">How Food Regulations Make Us Less Healthy</a>,” explains how government red tape results in less competition and higher food safety risks.</p>
<p>“Is government the best way to promote food quality, health and nutrition? I say no,” the narrator says in the video. “A freer market without distortions would allow consumers to buy cheaper, healthier food.”</p>
<p>Another video features libertarian&nbsp;<a href="http://www.jeffreytucker.me/">Jeffrey Tucker</a>&nbsp;recalling a&nbsp;<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ns2SHEZ_mjE">heart-wrenching personal story</a>&nbsp;about how a small increase in the minimum wage caused his mentally disabled friend, Tad, to lose his job at a department store.</p>
<p>“People want to know why I’m against the minimum wage,” a teary-eyed Tucker says in the video. “It’s because of Tad and all of the millions of other Tads out there.”</p>
<p>EDvantage editorial board member&nbsp;<a href="https://www0.gsb.columbia.edu/faculty/ghite/">Gailen Hite</a>&nbsp;says he’s “very pleased” with the website, but the Columbia University economics professor acknowledges that the editorial content “is not completely balanced.”</p>
<p>“It’s fair to say that most of us have a libertarian and market orientation,” he said, referring to EDvantage’s board members, all of whom are economists. The site’s content is certainly heavy on free-market perspectives, he added, “but that’s sort of consistent with the values of the organization.”</p>
<p>Besides, Hite said, college students could use a lesson in libertarianism.</p>
<p>“I don’t think the libertarian perspective gets that much of an airing on college campuses,” he said. “We would like to have our story told, too.”</p>
Charles Koch at the Philanthropy Roundtable Annual Meeting in 2011.
Chris Younghttps://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/chris-youngCritic of artificial sweeteners pilloried by industry-backed scientistshttp://www.publicintegrity.org/node/15207Any criticism of the artificial sweetener industry is met with a barrage of criticism, often from questionable sources.Food additive;American Beverage Association;Sweeteners;Sugar substitute;Sucralose;Aspartame;Saccharin;Diet drink;International Food Information Council;Diet food;Sweetness;Soft drink2014-08-06T09:34:26-04:002014-08-06T05:00:00-04:00<p>Susan Swithers is no stranger to food industry criticism.</p>
<p>In fact, the Purdue University professor anticipates a swift public relations blitz from trade groups representing diet- and low-calorie food companies every time she publishes a study about the health effects of artificial sweeteners.</p>
<p>“They reflexively put out a press release that spins it as, ‘Here’s what’s wrong with the study,’” says Swithers, a professor of behavioral neuroscience who has been researching artificial sweeteners for the past decade. “I’m sure I’m on somebody’s Google Alert at this point.”</p>
<p>Still, even Swithers was surprised by the way in which the diet food industry attacked a <a href="http://download.cell.com/images/edimages/Trends/EndoMetabolism/tem_888.pdf">paper</a> she published last summer that raised health concerns about popular sugar substitutes used in snack foods and diet drinks. In her <a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/news/artificial-sweeteners-could-lead-to-obesity-diabetes/">widely publicized</a> work, published as an opinion article in the journal <em>Trends in Endocrinology and Metabolism</em>, Swithers reviewed recent studies on artificial sweeteners and concluded that people who frequently consume sugar substitutes “may … be at increased risk of excessive weight gain, metabolic syndrome, type 2 diabetes, and cardiovascular disease.”</p>
<p>Seizing on the “opinion” tag, the food and beverage industry responded quickly. The American Beverage Association, for example, dismissed the paper’s findings, arguing that it was “not a scientific study.”</p>
<p>But perhaps the strongest, most wide-ranging attacks came from the Calorie Control Council, a lesser-known industry group with an innocuous-sounding name, a long history and a penchant for stealthy public relations tactics. The organization, which is run&nbsp;by an account executive with a global management and public relations firm, represents the low- and reduced-calorie food and beverage industry. But it functions more like an industry front group than a trade association.</p>
<p>In criticizing Swithers, the Council relied on industry-funded scientists, bloggers and dietitians — it even wrote a letter to the professor’s university demanding that the school stop promoting “biased science.”</p>
<p>“The intimidation tactics, going to somebody’s employer, it just seems to go beyond the realm of what’s reasonable,” says Swithers, who disputes the “opinion” critiques by noting that her paper was peer-reviewed and based on her assessment of recent scientific studies conducted about artificial sweeteners. “But I guess that’s par for the course in their world.”</p>
<p>Indeed, tracking the Calorie Control Council’s efforts to discredit Swithers’ paper on artificial sweeteners provides a lesson in how the food and beverage industry will go to great lengths — and often use questionable&nbsp;tactics — to protect its interests. With a brand new artificial sweetener about to hit the market, and with the science still unclear about the safety of sugar substitutes, industry’s efforts to discredit science unfavorable to their interests are unlikely to end anytime soon.</p>
<p>“This isn’t personal,” Swithers acknowledges. “This is about somebody’s bottom line."</p>
<p><strong>Uncertain science</strong></p>
<p>The global market for artificial sweeteners is expected to reach $2 billion by 2020. Fueled by weight-loss campaigns that promote low-calorie diets, sugar substitutes like aspartame (NutraSweet, Equal) and sucralose (Splenda) have become increasingly popular as consumers seek to shed calories without giving up sweet foods and beverages.</p>
<p>Artificial sweeteners are considered safe food additives by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. To date, the federal agency has approved six “high-intensity” sweeteners to be used in products like soft drinks, baked goods and chewing gum. Advantame, a powerful sweetener 20,000 times sweeter than table sugar, was&nbsp;<a href="http://www.fda.gov/Food/NewsEvents/ConstituentUpdates/ucm397740.htm">approved</a>&nbsp;by the federal agency in May.</p>
<p>“All of the approved high-intensity sweeteners have been thoroughly studied and have a reasonable certainty of no harm to consumers under their approved conditions of use,” FDA spokeswoman Theresa Eisenman wrote in an emailed response to questions.</p>
<p>But while many studies — some funded by the food industry — have concluded that artificial sweeteners are safe additives that can help people lose weight, others have associated them with short- and long-term health problems, including weight gain, diabetes, cardiovascular disease — even cancer. The conflicting studies have sparked seemingly endless debate among scientists, health professionals and consumers.</p>
<p>Walter Willett, chair of the department of nutrition at Harvard School of Public Health, says artificial sweeteners should be used like a nicotine patch to help wean people off of sugary foods and beverages that are more clearly tied to weight gain and diabetes. But when it comes to long-term health effects, he says, “There is some element of unknown in most of the artificial sweeteners.”</p>
<p>“Industry will of course say, ‘This has been approved by the FDA and tested,’” says Willett, who was the target of industry criticism for a 2012 study he co-authored that raised the possibility that aspartame could be linked to cancer. “But I think the public needs to be aware that this is not absolute evidence of safety."</p>
<p><strong>Industry attacks</strong></p>
<p>If the public had any fears about the safety of the artificial sweeteners, Swithers’ paper only added to them. That’s probably why the Calorie Control Council acted so swiftly —and strongly — when the scientist’s conclusions made national headlines.</p>
<p>“Today an opinion&nbsp;article published in the journal&nbsp;<em>Trends in Endocrinology &amp; Metabolism&nbsp;</em>claimed to&nbsp;review ‘surprising evidence on the negative impact of artificial sweeteners,’” Beth Hubrich, the Council’s executive director, wrote in a&nbsp;<a href="http://www.theskinnyonlowcal.org/swithers-opinion-sweeteners-not-evidence/">blog post</a>&nbsp;on Council-run website TheSkinnyOnLowCal.org. “But what’s really surprising, especially for a scientific journal, was the lack of sound data to back up the author’s highly speculative&nbsp;assertions.”</p>
<p>Hubrich quoted from a Council&nbsp;<a href="http://www.caloriecontrol.org/pressrelease/opinion-piece-on-low-calorie-sweeteners-only-tells-one-side-of-the-story">press release</a>&nbsp;citing John Fernstrom, a professor of psychiatry and pharmacology at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, who expressed skepticism about Swithers’ conclusions.</p>
<p>“Dr. Swithers largely fails to point out that many intervention studies have been conducted over the past few decades, and uniformly show that when artificial sweeteners are introduced into the diet … fewer sugars and calories are ingested, and body fat content and body weight are reduced,” Fernstrom said. “So, artificial sweeteners by themselves do not make people fat (or diabetic).”</p>
<p>Not mentioned is that Fernstrom is a scientific consultant for&nbsp;<a href="http://www.ajinomoto-usa.com/">Ajinomoto</a>, a Japanese food and chemical company that makes aspartame. Nor did the Council’s press release mention that he and his wife,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.drmadelynfernstrom.com/">Madelyn Fernstrom</a>, a professor of psychiatry, epidemiology and surgery at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, have ties to industry groups.&nbsp;</p>
<p>John Fernstrom is the scientific advisor to the&nbsp;<a href="http://www.ilsi.org/NorthAmerica/Pages/LowCalorieSweeteners.aspx" style="line-height: 1.6;">Committee on Low-Calorie Sweeteners</a>, whose members include Ajinomoto, Coca-Cola and PepsiCo. His wife, who is the diet and nutrition editor for the NBC Today show, is on the&nbsp;<a href="http://www.foodinsight.org/pages/board-trustees" style="line-height: 1.6;">board of trustees</a>&nbsp;for the International Food Information Council Foundation, which has been labeled an&nbsp;<a href="http://www.centerforfoodsafety.org/files/front_groups_final_84531.pdf" style="line-height: 1.6;">industry front group</a>&nbsp;by public health advocates.</p>
<p>In May, Madelyn Fernstrom appeared on a&nbsp;<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ww2tJ-sro7A">Today show segment</a>&nbsp;to talk about sugars and artificial sweeteners. During the segment, she noted that low-calorie sweeteners were recognized as safe by the FDA, and she cited a just-released study that found that drinking diet beverages containing artificial sweeteners might help people lose more weight than drinking water.</p>
<p>The Today show’s nutrition editor did not mention to viewers that the study was&nbsp;<a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/oby.20737/full">funded entirely by the American Beverage Association</a>&nbsp;and that two of the study’s authors received consulting fees from Coca-Cola. She also did not mention her husband’s ties to the manufacturer of aspartame.</p>
<p>John Fernstrom told the&nbsp;<a href="http://www.publicintegrity.org">Center for Public Integrity&nbsp;</a>that his industry ties have “no impact on my work.” He says the most reliable scientific studies show that sugar substitutes are safe, and he notes that “some of the best research is done” by industry.</p>
<p>Fernstrom says companies have a strong incentive to thoroughly test their products to make sure they are safe. Otherwise, if they turn out to be harmful to consumers, “you’re out of business,” he says. “Industry is not the enemy.”</p>
<p>A University of Pittsburgh Medical Center spokeswoman for Madelyn Fernstrom did not respond to requests for comment by press time.</p>
<p>Megan Kopf, a spokeswoman for NBC, issued a statement: “We take disclosure issues seriously and are currently looking into this.&nbsp; Madelyn has been a long-time contributor to NBC News and has always reported with integrity.”</p>
<p>Not only did the Council attack Swithers’ paper from the perspective of a scientist, but it also criticized it from the perspective of the everyday mom. Blogging at ILoveDietSoda.com, Council writer “Jenni PS” — a “busy woman” who gets through the day thanks to “the little things, like a can of diet soda” —<a href="http://www.ilovedietsoda.com/2013/07/low-cal-sweetener-opinion-piece-not.html">lamented</a>&nbsp;“another ridiculous&nbsp;opinion piece&nbsp;about the ‘downsides’ of low-calorie sweeteners.”</p>
<p>Council consultant Robyn Flipse, a dietitian who also&nbsp;<a href="http://www.robynflipse.com/clients.php">represents food companies</a>&nbsp;like Splenda, Coca-Cola and Kraft Foods, took to the comments section of an&nbsp;<a href="http://www.npr.org/2013/07/12/201461166/not-so-sweet-side-effects-of-artificial-sweeteners">NPR story</a>&nbsp;to critique Swithers’ paper. “Low calorie sweeteners are not making us fat or sick,” Flipse wrote in a lengthy comment. “Inactivity, excess calories and unbalanced food choices are.”</p>
<p>In an interview, Flipse told the Center that her ties to industry, including the Council, have no influence on her work. “I’m never told what to say,” she says, adding that she tries to help correct misinformation spread online and in the media about artificial sweeteners. Talking points “are not fed to me,” and she says the Council never tells her where or when to comment.</p>
<p>Perhaps the most brazen of all the Council’s attacks was its&nbsp;<a href="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/1239268-calorie-control-council-letter-to-purdue.html">formal letter</a>&nbsp;to Purdue University.</p>
<p>“The Council has serious concerns with the University’s actions in promoting Dr. Swithers’ opinion,” Council President Haley Curtis Stevens wrote to Purdue’s assistant vice president of marketing, noting that the paper “ignored decades of research affirming the safety of low-calorie sweeteners.”</p>
<p>“Promoting biased science, we feel, is not acting in the best interest of public health,” she wrote.</p>
<p>Amy Patterson Neubert, a&nbsp;Purdue spokeswoman, wrote in an email to the Center that the university has always supported Swithers' work. "Even a year after the publication of her peer-reviewed opinion piece," she wrote, "she still receives requests for interviews, which we help facilitate."</p>
<p>The Council's letter to Purdue was followed by more criticism from yet another industry ally.&nbsp;</p>
<p>In response to the Purdue professor’s conclusions, two scientists from Baylor College of Medicine — Craig A. Johnston and John Foreyt — submitted a letter to Trends in Endocrinology and Metabolism, the journal that published Swithers’ paper.</p>
<p>In their letter published online, the authors called Swithers’ paper “highly selective, misleading, and biased” and noted that artificial sweeteners “are safe and provide individuals seeking to lose or maintain weight a healthy alternative to help to decrease caloric consumption.”</p>
<p>But the authors did not submit a&nbsp;conflict of interest statement with their letter. Only after the journal posted the letter online did editors learn that Foreyt had ties to industry. A spokeswoman for the journal confirmed that editors contacted the authors asking them to submit a disclosure statement to be published in the journal’s print edition.</p>
<p>“Dr. John P. Foreyt received grants, honoraria, donations, and consulting fees from numerous food, beverage, and pharmaceutical companies, as well as other commercial and nonprofit entities with interests in obesity,” the conflict of interest statement read. “He has served and is currently serving as a board member for multiple food, beverage, and pharmaceutical companies.”</p>
<p>Foreyt is listed on a&nbsp;<a href="http://www.caloriescount.com/aboutUs.aspx?AspxAutoDetectCookieSupport=1">Council website</a>&nbsp;as an advisor to the trade group, but Dipali Pathak, a spokeswoman for Baylor College of Medicine, wrote in an email to the Center that “he has not worked with them for years.”</p>
<p>As for the authors’ omitted disclosure statement, she wrote, Foreyt and Johnston “were not asked to disclose any information on ties to the industry. Once the editor asked them to disclose this, they sent the information and the letter was republished with this information.”</p>
<p><strong>Trade association or front group?</strong></p>
<p>The Calorie Control Council, established in 1966, isn’t your typical trade association. For one thing, it’s run by Kellen Company, a global management and public relations firm. Stevens, the Council’s president, is an&nbsp;<a href="http://www.kellencompany.com/taxonomy/term/183/0">account executive</a>&nbsp;at the PR firm.</p>
<p>Unlike other trade associations, including the International Sweeteners Association and the American Beverage Association, the Council does not publicly list its members. Nor does its website reveal its board of directors, which can be found on the trade group’s annual tax documents.</p>
<p>According to the Council’s 2012 tax filing, the board &nbsp;includes officials from soda companies like Coca-Cola and PepsiCo, as well as artificial sweetener manufacturers like Ajinomoto and Merisant Company.</p>
<p>The Council orchestrated its first major public relations campaign in 1977. In response to an FDA proposal to ban the first artificial sweetener —saccharin — after studies linked it to cancer in rats, the industry group took out full-page advertisements in national newspapers discrediting the science behind the proposed ban. The ads encouraged readers to contact government officials and “let them know that you support postponement of a ban” until further studies on saccharin were completed.</p>
<p>The Council’s “media campaign was phenomenally effective at mobilizing consumers of artificial sweeteners for political action,” Carolyn de la Pena, a professor of American studies at the University of California at Davis, wrote in her 2010 book “Empty Pleasures: The Story of Artificial Sweeteners from Saccharin to Splenda.”</p>
<p>The ban on saccharin was never implemented, and the food additive remains on the market today.</p>
<p>Despite playing an integral role in helping save saccharin, de la Pena says the Calorie Control Council never became a household name. Nor did it become widely known during the debate over aspartame.</p>
<p>The Calorie Control Council was “the invisible force behind the approval of aspartame,” she says.</p>
<p>Today, most Americans have probably never heard of the Council, but they may have come across a website run by the trade group — without realizing that it’s controlled by industry.</p>
<p>The Council operates a number of industry-friendly websites, including&nbsp;<a href="http://www.aspartame.org/">aspartame.org</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://sucralose.org/">sucralose.org</a>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<a href="http://saccharin.org/">saccharin.org</a>. None of the sites disclose that the Council&nbsp;represents companies that&nbsp;make low-calorie, reduced-fat foods.</p>
<p>On the aspartame site, for example, the Calorie Control Council only describes itself — in small print at the bottom of the home page — as a “non-profit association” that “seeks to provide an objective channel of scientific-based communications about low-calorie foods and beverages, to assure that scientific and consumer research and information is made available to all interested parties.”</p>
<p><strong>Government posts industry sites</strong></p>
<p>Even the government&nbsp;has&nbsp; fed into&nbsp;the impression&nbsp;that the Council is an independent source of information about artificial sweeteners. Type “FDA and artificial sweeteners” into Google, and the top search result is a&nbsp;<a href="http://fnic.nal.usda.gov/food-composition/nutritive-and-nonnutritive-sweetener-resources">webpage</a>&nbsp;run by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The page about sweeteners includes two links to Council-run webpages, including one called the “Aspartame Information Center.”</p>
<p>In an emailed statement, Stevens indicated that the Calorie Control Council clearly states on its “About” page on its CalorieControl.org website that the group represents “the low- and reduced-calorie food and beverage industry.”</p>
<p>But the&nbsp;description of the organization is not included on all of the other websites the Council runs.</p>
<p>In her statement, Stevens wrote that artificial sweeteners “can be important tools for people who wish to manage their carbohydrate and/or caloric intake.” Without directly mentioning Swithers, she also defended the Council’s response to the Purdue scientist’s paper.</p>
<p>“When studies do not meet certain acceptable scientific criteria, including peer review, reproducibility, and study design quality,” Stevens wrote, “the Council addresses those studies through thoughtful outreach to relevant parties.”</p>
<p>Public health advocates critical of food industry influence say the Calorie Control Council’s public relations strategy, as evidenced by its attempts to discredit Swithers’ paper, follows a well-established industry playbook: “Attack the science, recruit sympathetic scientists, do public relations, and then do everything possible behind the scenes to protect the industry,” says Marion Nestle, a professor of nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University.</p>
<p>Michele Simon, a public health lawyer who has written a&nbsp;<a href="http://www.centerforfoodsafety.org/files/front_groups_final_84531.pdf">guide to food industry front groups</a>, says the Council operates “mostly under the radar, which is part of what makes them effective.”</p>
<p>But despite being relatively unknown, she adds, “the fact that they’ve been able to create confusion and doubt over the studies that question the safety of artificial sweeteners means they are highly effective."</p>
Chris Younghttps://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/chris-youngKochs put a happy face on free enterprisehttp://www.publicintegrity.org/node/14988Initiative spearheaded by billionaire brothers paints positive portrait of free-market system.Conservatism in the United States;Koch family;Political activities of the Koch brothers;Happy;Free enterprise;Enterprise;Ethnic groups in Nepal2014-07-07T15:02:59-04:002014-06-25T06:00:00-04:00<p><em><strong>Editor’s note</strong>: This story is one in a continuing series on <a href="https://www.publicintegrity.org/politics/consider-source/misinformation-industry">Washington, D.C.’s misinformation industry</a>. The series seeks to illuminate the sometimes-misleading methods used by special interest groups to gain support for their agendas from government and average Americans.</em></p>
<p>When Arthur C. Brooks stepped on stage in December, the influential conservative’s mission was simple, yet ambitious: “If I do my job,” <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sDH4mzsQP0w&amp;feature=youtu.be">Brooks began his speech</a>, “in the next few minutes I’m going to give you the secret to happiness.”</p>
<p>Standing before large block letters that spelled “H-A-P-P-I-N-E-S-S,” the charismatic president of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, explained how genetics, major life events and choices all contribute to one’s well-being.</p>
<p>Brooks mentioned the importance of forging close relationships with family, promoted charitable giving and emphasized that “money doesn’t buy happiness.”</p>
<p>Nearing the end of his nearly 20-minute speech, Brooks said happiness also depends on … free markets?</p>
<p>“The earned-success system that brings you happiness is the system of free enterprise that lifts people out of poverty,” Brooks said. “Don’t work for the stateism, the collectivism that suppresses this,” he added. “Work for the free enterprise that makes this possible.”</p>
<p><strong>Don’t worry, be happy</strong></p>
<p>Proponents say the free market system encourages investment, stimulates innovation and increases efficiency. But according to Brooks, it also makes you happy and improves your well-being — even if you’re poor.</p>
<p>The message appears to be part of a new public relations initiative spearheaded by America’s most high-profile free-market advocates: Charles and David Koch, the billionaire brothers who have built a powerful political empire based on libertarian principles.</p>
<p>Brooks, whose high-profile think tank receives Koch funding, was recently tapped to serve on the advisory board of the Charles Koch Institute’s “<a href="http://www.charleskochinstitute.org/research-initiatives/">Well-Being Initiative</a>,” which “aims to advance our understanding of the meaning, foundations, and drivers of human flourishing” through research, education and discussion.</p>
<p>The initiative may be billed as a way to explore well-being, but some critics of the Koch brothers are skeptical.</p>
<p>“The question needs to be: Whose well-being are we talking about?” asks Tony Carrk, a director at the Center for American Progress, a liberal advocacy group that serves as a counterweight to the Koch brothers’ political operation. “The policies that the Koch brothers have promoted and put forward seem to only benefit those at the very top, at the expense of everyone else.”</p>
<p>Officials from the Charles Koch Institute did not respond to requests for comment.</p>
<p>The Kochs oversee a political ecosystem whose influence stretches far and wide — from think tanks and universities to trade associations and political action committees. As their public profile has risen, so too has criticism.</p>
<p>In January, Koch Industries, America’s second-largest privately held company, hired Steve Lombardo of global public relations firm Burson-Marsteller as “part of an effort by the Koch brothers to tell their story better,” <a href="http://www.politico.com/playbook/0114/playbook12667.html">according to Politico</a>.</p>
<p>“Koch Industries is working to improve the daily life of people around the world,” he said, “and I look forward to working with the team to bring this story to the global marketplace.”</p>
<p>In May, <a href="http://www.politico.com/story/2014/05/koch-brothers-americans-for-prosperity-2014-elections-106520.html">Politico reported on a memo</a> from the Koch brothers’ powerful political group Americans for Prosperity, which laid the groundwork for its future political operations.</p>
<p>“[W]e consistently see that Americans in general are concerned that free-market policy — and its advocates — benefit the rich and powerful more than the most vulnerable of society,” the memo read. “We must correct this misconception.”</p>
<p><strong>Koch and the ‘true nature of well-being’</strong></p>
<p>Charles Koch informally introduced the Well-Being Initiative in a January&nbsp;<a href="http://www.kochind.com/perspectives/perspectives_detail.aspx?id=44">blog post</a>&nbsp;titled, “The importance of well-being.”</p>
<p>“Through sound research, broad education and robust discussion, the Initiative aims to advance understanding of what it means to flourish, how to understand and measure the various aspects of well-being, and how to empower individuals to live better lives,” he wrote.</p>
<p>The Charles Koch Foundation, a separate nonprofit from Koch Institute and supporter of the Well-Being Initiative, recently posted on its website calls for research proposals, seeking “doctoral students interested in contributing to the academic exploration of the role free societies play in advancing human well-being and prosperity,”&nbsp;<a href="http://www.charleskochfoundation.org/dissertation-research-grant-information/">one proposal request states</a>.</p>
<p>Before it recently underwent a redesign and many old links died, the Charles Koch Institute’s website had highlighted past well-being events and work published by Brooks and other board members dating back to last fall. It also linked to Brooks’ “Secret to Happiness” speech.</p>
<p>In December, Brooks published an op-ed in&nbsp;<em>The New York Times&nbsp;</em>titled, “<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/15/opinion/sunday/a-formula-for-happiness.html?pagewanted=1&amp;_r=0">A Formula for Happiness</a>,” which mirrored his American Enterprise Institute speech. A few months later, in a&nbsp;<em>Times</em>&nbsp;op-ed about income inequality and what he referred to as the “rising sympathy for income redistribution,” he argued that there is “a strong link between economic envy and unhappiness.”</p>
<p>And in February, Brooks even managed to pull off the unthinkable: He got the Dalai Lama, a self-described socialist, to visit the American Enterprise Institute, which decries socialism.</p>
<p>The title of the&nbsp;<a href="http://www.aei.org/events/2014/02/20/happiness-free-enterprise-and-human-flourishing-a-special-online-event-featuring-his-holiness-the-dalai-lama/">panel discussion</a>&nbsp;featuring the Tibetan leader: “Happiness, free enterprise, and human flourishing.”</p>
<p>Brooks did not respond to requests for comment.</p>
<p>Some recent well-being forums sponsored by the Charles Koch Institute have featured panel discussions on the&nbsp;<a href="http://www.charleskochinstitute.org/OKopps/">economy</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://charleskochinstitute.org/ruleoflaw/">criminal justice</a>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<a href="http://www.charleskochinstitute.org/ideas/highered/">higher education</a>, among others.</p>
<p>On Wednesday, the Charles Koch Institute will host what it’s calling its “<a href="http://www.charleskochinstitute.org/events-news/wellbeingforum/">Inaugural Well-Being Forum</a>” at the Newseum in downtown Washington, D.C.</p>
<p><strong>Not-so-diverse board</strong></p>
<p>The five-member advisory board of the Well-Being Initiative includes Ángel Cabrera, president of George Mason University and Tyler Cowen, a popular libertarian professor at the school who has been dubbed “<a href="http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/11_23/b4231066695798.htm">America’s Hottest Economist</a>.”</p>
<p>As the&nbsp;<a href="http://www.publicintegrity.org/2014/03/27/14497/inside-koch-brothers-campus-crusade">Center reported</a>&nbsp;in March, two of the six private charitable foundations the Koch brothers control and personally fund combined in 2012 to pump more than $12.7 million into colleges and universities. George Mason University has received more Koch money than any other school.</p>
<p>“The Charles Koch Foundation has been generous to the university, and they have supported various efforts in areas that are important to us, so this time around they wanted my guidance and advice, and I thought it would be a great thing to do,” Cabrera told the Center for Public Integrity in an interview.</p>
<p>Cabrera — not a libertarian, he says — explained that the Koch’s Well-Being Initiative lines up with the university’s strategic plan, which includes a well-being component. He refuted the idea that this initiative was all about promoting the Koch brothers’ libertarian ideology.</p>
<p>“If they had a pre-defined definition or ideology that they wanted to push with this effort, the last thing you want is free, independent thinkers telling you what to do,” he pointed out.</p>
<p>The initiative seeks to explore various research areas, including something called “neuroeconomics” — a field of study that merges brain science and economics to explore economic decision-making.</p>
<p>Advisory board member Paul Zak, aka “Dr. Love,” is a neuroeconomist and founding director of the&nbsp;<a href="http://www.neuroeconomicstudies.org/">Center for Neuroeconomics Studies</a>&nbsp;at Claremont Graduate University. He is widely known for his research into the brain chemical oxytocin — which he calls the “moral molecule” that is key to improving social interactions, including those involving financial transactions.</p>
<p>Zak has concluded in his research that&nbsp;<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5a23t_9Y1w">free markets are inherently moral</a>.</p>
<p>In an interview, Zak told The Center for Public Integrity that he had reservations about joining the advisory board when he was first approached by Koch Institute officials about nine months ago.</p>
<p>“I said, ‘You guys have kind of a dicey reputation,’” Zak recalled, noting that he disagrees with some of the Koch brothers’ political efforts. “And they said, ‘Yeah, we know, and we want to start funding some good science so that we can allow people to draw their own conclusions.’”</p>
<p>Zak said officials convinced him that the Well-Being Initiative is apolitical.</p>
<p>“It seems non-agenda driven,” he said. “We really want to understand [well-being] better and we want lots of people to use this. Let’s try to make a really global, useful, broad index and just see what it tells us about government policies, about economic growth, about all of these things that can affect people’s well-being.”</p>
<p>Still, Zak acknowledges that the initiative’s advisory board is dominated by libertarians. “Could [the board] be more diverse?” he asked. “Probably.”</p>
<p><strong>More libertarianism</strong></p>
<p>The other two advisory board member positions are filled by&nbsp;<a href="http://www.utexas.edu/lbj/directory/faculty/william-inboden">William Inboden</a>, a professor of public affairs at the University of Texas-Austin, and Chris Rufer, the president and founder of the Morning Star Company.</p>
<p>A former fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, Inboden was previously the senior vice president of the London-based&nbsp;<a href="http://www.li.com/about/about-li">Legatum Institute</a>, which publishes the “<a href="http://www.prosperity.com/#!/">Prosperity Index</a>,” ranking countries based on wealth, economic growth and quality of life.</p>
<p>Rufer is a board member of the&nbsp;<a href="http://www.freetochoosenetwork.org/">Free to Choose Network</a>, which produces broadcast programs that air on PBS stations. Last November, the network produced “<a href="http://www.freetochoosemedia.org/broadcasts/economic_freedom/press/efia_press_release.pdf">Economic Freedom in Action: Changing Lives</a>,” a documentary about how the “rise in economic freedom has led to increased prosperity and longevity, allowing more people to rise out of poverty and build positive futures for themselves and their children.”</p>
<p>The program, funded in part by Chris Rufer and his wife, aired on stations&nbsp;<a href="http://www.changinglivesfilm.com/press/efia_carriage.pdf">all across the country</a>.</p>
<p>In an interview with the Center, Rufer said the Koch brothers’ message has been misinterpreted by the liberal media.</p>
<p>“Is it a PR move?” he asked. “Call it PR. What do you do when you put on a better shirt so you think the girls will look at you? Is that fraud? It’s not fraud. You’re just trying to represent yourself.”</p>
<p>This initiative, though, is good PR to a good end, he said.</p>
<p>“If you’re maliciously trying to deceive, well that’s bad,” he said. “But look at well-being and look at libertarianism and I think you’ll see it’s pretty consistent … because that is the objective of libertarianism: human welfare.”</p>
<p><em>Erin Quinn contributed to this story.</em></p>
Screen grab of American Enterprise Institute video "The secret to happiness"
Chris Younghttps://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/chris-youngFourth case reopened after Center uncovers judicial conflict of interesthttp://www.publicintegrity.org/node/14946U.S. appeals court reopened foreclosure case after Center uncovered that a judge owned stock in Wells Fargo, court reaches same decision.Political corruption;Conflict of interest;Philosophy of science;Scientific misconduct2014-06-19T09:45:55-04:002014-06-17T06:00:00-04:00<p>A federal appeals court has scrapped a 2010 foreclosure ruling in favor of Wells Fargo Bank after a Center for Public Integrity investigation revealed that one of the three <a href="https://www.publicintegrity.org/2014/04/28/14630/federal-judges-plead-guilty">judges who participated in the decision owned stock</a> in the banking giant.</p>
<p>But Mountaga and Michelle Johnson Bah, the couple fighting to keep their Bowie, Maryland, home, didn’t get the decision they wanted when a new panel of judges reopened the case. On June 10, the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals once again dismissed the couple’s claims accusing Wells Fargo of predatory lending.</p>
<p>“I do not agree with it,” Mountaga Bah said of the most recent judgment.</p>
<p>“I’m not going to give up,” he added. “I am not going to leave my home.”</p>
<p>The Virginia-based appeals court <a href="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/1198198-bah-v-wells-fargo-new-panel-decision-6-10-2014.html">reopened</a> the case at the Bahs’ request. The couple had challenged the judgment after the <a href="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/1106424-keenan-bah-v-wellsfargo.html">court acknowledged</a> in March that Judge Barbara Keenan owned $1,900 worth of stock in Wells Fargo at the time she participated in the 2010 ruling favoring the bank.</p>
<p>In a May 27 letter to the court, Bah called the original appeals court judgment unfair and urged the court to reopen the case. “The only decision we are looking for is the dismissal of the decision and to save our home with our three little girls,” he wrote.</p>
<p>The Center identified the conflict while reporting its months-long&nbsp;<a href="http://www.publicintegrity.org/2014/04/28/14630/federal-judges-plead-guilty">“Juris Imprudence”</a>&nbsp;investigation, which found 26 examples since 2010 where federal appellate judges ruled on cases in which they had a financial conflict. By law, judges cannot own even a single share of stock in companies that come before them.&nbsp;</p>
<p>In response to the Center’s findings — and as required under court rules — judges in all of those cases had&nbsp;<a href="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/1149940-reavley-tilli-v-exxonmobil.html">letters sent to the litigants</a>&nbsp;to alert them of the conflicts. The letters were the first step in possibly reopening the cases.</p>
<p>Keenan’s case is the fourth to be reopened due to the Center’s reporting.</p>
<p>Of those cases, one other case had a panel reach the <a href="http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/USCOURTS-ca4-09-01701/pdf/USCOURTS-ca4-09-01701-1.pdf">same decision</a> as the first. In April, the 4th Circuit favored General Electric in a civil rights suit after an initial decision was thrown out because Judge Allyson Duncan controlled an estate that held stock in the company.</p>
<p>Two other cases are still pending. Many of the others remain in limbo.</p>
<p>Jim Hines, a spokesman for Wells Fargo Home Mortgage, declined to discuss the Bah foreclosure case in detail. “We believe the decision was appropriate,” he said.</p>
<p>For now, the Bahs remain in their home, partly because they filed for bankruptcy in 2009. But Bah said he is struggling to keep up with mortgage payments. And he said he is feeling overwhelmed by the legal process.</p>
<p>Despite the latest setback, though, he said he will continue his legal fight against Wells Fargo. Bah said he is currently looking for an attorney to help him file an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.</p>
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<p>&nbsp;</p>
Chris Younghttps://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/chris-youngCourt reopens third case after Center uncovered judicial conflicts of interesthttp://www.publicintegrity.org/node/14871Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reopens 2007 case after Center alerts judge that his wife owned ExxonMobil stock when he ruled on case.Political corruption;Conflict of interest;Philosophy of science;Scientific misconduct;Government Center2014-06-03T16:33:25-04:002014-06-03T11:27:59-04:00<p>A federal appeals court has <a href="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/1180304-fifth-circuit-judgment-withdrawn.html" style="line-height: 1.6;">withdrawn</a> a three-judge panel’s 2007 dismissal of a Pennsylvania man’s lawsuit against ExxonMobil Corp. after a <a href="https://www.publicintegrity.org/2014/04/28/14630/federal-judges-plead-guilty">Center for Public Integrity investigation</a> found that the wife of one of the judges owned up to $100,000 worth of stock in the oil company at the time of the panel’s decision.</p>
<p>The New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals had dubbed the case as “frivolous” when it originally dismissed the case that <a href="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/1180309-tilli-v-exxonmobil-original-complaint.html">accused ExxonMobil and its chairman of maliciously and illegally raising oil and gas prices</a>.</p>
<p>But the court reopened the case on May 15, one day after the court received a letter from the plaintiff, Daniel Tilli, saying that he was “in disbelief” that Judge Thomas Reavley did not know that his wife had <a href="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/1180324-reavleys-wife-exxonmobil-2007-stock-ownership.html">owned stock in the oil company</a> until seven years after the court ruled. Reavley is married to fellow 5th Circuit Judge Carolyn King.</p>
<p>Tilli, a Bethlehem, Pa., resident who represented himself, requested that a new panel hear his case because Reavley was “not impartial.”</p>
<p>By law, judges cannot own even a single share of stock in companies that come before them. Nor can their spouses or dependent children.</p>
<p>Tilli learned about the judge’s conflict of interest after it was brought to the 5th Circuit’s attention by the Center in early April. The Center identified the conflict while reporting its months-long <a href="http://www.publicintegrity.org/2014/04/28/14630/federal-judges-plead-guilty">“Juris Imprudence”</a> investigation, which found 26 other examples since 2010 where federal appellate judges ruled on cases in which they had a financial conflict.</p>
<p>As required under court rules, Reavley and judges in all of those cases had <a href="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/1149940-reavley-tilli-v-exxonmobil.html">letters sent to the litigants</a> to alert them of the mistakes. The letters were the first step in possibly reopening the cases.</p>
<p>Reavley’s case is the third to be reopened due to the Center’s reporting.</p>
<p>In one case that was reopened because of a stock conflict involving 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Allyson Duncan, a new three-judge panel reached the same decision as the first. <a href="http://www.publicintegrity.org/2014/05/13/14748/case-reopened-after-center-reveals-judges-conflict-interest">Another case</a> tainted by stock ownership of 11th Circuit Judge Frank Hull is still pending. Many of the others remain in limbo.</p>
<p>Lyle Cayce, the 5th Circuit clerk of court, told the Center that Reavley’s involvement in the Tilli case was the result of a “staff error.” He said the case pre-dated an automated screening process, which helps the court avoid assigning judges to cases in which they have a conflict of interest.</p>
<p>Now that the 2007 judgment has been withdrawn, a newly constituted three-judge panel without Reavley will review the case. But it’s unclear how long it will take the new panel to reach a decision.</p>
<p>Because the case wrapped up nearly seven years ago, Cayce said the court is currently retrieving some case records, which are no longer stored in the court.</p>
<p>It’s also unclear how a new panel will rule. Neither Tilli nor an attorney for ExxonMobil could immediately be reached for comment.</p>
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Chris Younghttps://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/chris-youngJudge who stopped Wisconsin campaign finance probe tied to Koch-funded junketshttp://www.publicintegrity.org/node/14822Federal judge who attended Koch-funded conferences halts campaign finance investigation into Wisconsin group with Koch ties.Conservatism in the United States;Scott Walker;Wisconsin gubernatorial recall election;Wisconsin;Rudolph T. Randa;Bradley Foundation;Eric O'Keefe2014-05-27T17:19:16-04:002014-05-27T17:05:05-04:00<p>The federal judge who ordered an end to an investigation into possible illegal campaign coordination between Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and conservative groups during two recent recall elections regularly attended expenses-paid judicial conferences sponsored by conservative organizations including the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation — groups that have funded efforts against campaign finance reform.</p>
<p>In a <a href="http://media.jrn.com/documents/doeruling.pdf">26-page decision</a> issued on May 6, Judge Rudolph Randa of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin ordered prosecutors to immediately halt its long-running investigation into the campaign spending and fundraising activities of Walker, the Wisconsin Club for Growth and other conservative groups. Prosecutors were trying to determine whether the Walker campaign and the conservative groups were illegally coordinating campaign strategies at the time of the 2011 and 2012 recall elections in Wisconsin.</p>
<p>The Wisconsin Club for Growth spent millions on ads during Wisconsin’s recall elections, supporting the governor’s collective-bargaining reforms. It requested that the federal court stop the investigation, claiming that the probe violated the group’s constitutional right to free speech. &nbsp;</p>
<p>Randa wrote in his decision that the Wisconsin Club for Growth had found a way to get around campaign finance laws. “That circumvention should not and cannot be condemned or restricted,” the decision said. &nbsp;“Instead, it should be recognized as promoting political speech.”</p>
<p>As the Wisconsin-based Center for Media and Democracy <a href="http://www.prwatch.org/news/2014/05/12489/federal-judge-who-halted-walker-dark-money-criminal-probe-attends-koch-judicial">first reported</a>, Randa has regularly attended expenses-paid judicial conferences hosted by George Mason University’s Law &amp; Economics Center and funded by right-wing foundations like the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation and large corporations like ExxonMobil, Dow Chemical and Pfizer.</p>
<p>A <a href="http://www.publicintegrity.org/2013/03/28/12368/corporations-pro-business-nonprofits-foot-bill-judicial-seminars">Center for Public Integrity investigation</a> last year revealed that conservative foundations and corporate giants were the most frequent sponsors of George Mason judicial conferences, which often serve state and federal judges a steady dose of free-market, anti-regulation lectures.</p>
<p>Most recently, court records show, Randa reported attending an <a href="https://psds.uscourts.gov/seminar.fwx?mode=pubpdfview&amp;refno=0000000249&amp;pprefno=0000001434">October 2013 judicial conference</a> hosted by the university’s Law &amp; Economics Center. The three-day conference, titled “Antitrust Law &amp; Economics Institute for Judges,” was sponsored by the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation and the John William Pope Foundation, among other conservative groups, corporations and individuals.</p>
<p>Previously, Randa attended George Mason judicial conferences in <a href="http://www.prwatch.org/files/rudolph-t-randa-financial-disclosure-report-for-2006.pdf">2006</a>, <a href="http://www.prwatch.org/files/rudolph-t-randa-financial-disclosure-report-for-2008.pdf">2008</a>, 2010 and <a href="http://www.prwatch.org/files/rudolph_t_randa-2012.pdf">2012</a>, according to the Center for Media and Democracy.</p>
<p>The Wisconsin Club for Growth’s director, Eric O’Keefe, has <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Eric_O%27Keefe">connections to the Koch brothers</a>.&nbsp; Michael Grebe, the Bradley Foundation’s president and CEO, chaired Gov. Walker’s 2010 and 2012 gubernatorial campaigns.</p>
<p>A woman who answered the phone in Randa’s chambers Tuesday said he would not comment on cases that are still pending.</p>
<p>In siding with the Wisconsin Club for Growth, Randa told prosecutors to return all of the property seized during their investigation and to destroy copies of documents they obtained during their searches.</p>
<p>A day after his ruling, however, the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals stayed Randa’s order ending the investigation, ruling that the judge <a href="http://www.jsonline.com/news/statepolitics/halt-to-john-doe-probe-lifts-obstacle-to-scott-walker-re-election-bid-b99264574z1-258293621.html">overstepped his authority</a> when he ordered that prosecutors destroy documents.</p>
Chris Younghttps://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/chris-youngWhat do federal appellate judges own?http://www.publicintegrity.org/node/14615A database of investments, outside income, gifts and other disclosures.2016-06-22T08:34:43-04:002014-04-28T00:01:00-04:00<p>Sort by name, circuit or investment to find the assets owned, gifts and reimbursements received and extra income <a href="https://www.publicintegrity.org/2014/04/28/14630/federal-judges-plead-guilty">earned by federal appellate judges</a>. Scroll down to view results in each category. Note that judges report the income and value amounts for each asset in a range. The data below represents financial disclosure reports from 2012, the most recent calendar year available. Federal judges must file 2013 reports by May 15, 2014.</p>
<p>If you believe you have a story to tell about your own experience with the court, or feel a federal appellate judge ruled on a case when he or she shouldn’t, <a href="https://www.publicintegrity.org/2014/04/28/14627/get-involved-help-judges-disclosures-investigation-go-further-donations-and-news">please let us know</a>.</p>
<iframe src="https://qvs.visiblegovernment.us/QvAJAXZfc/notoolbar.htm?document=Clients/Newspapers/Public_Integrity/Judge_Disclosure/CPI_JudgeDisclosure.qvw&host=localhost&anonymous=true" width="940" height="1100" frameborder="0"></iframe><p>Note to readers:&nbsp;To access the actual disclosure form,&nbsp;click the judge's name, then click the PDF image in the right-hand corner. See a mistake? Please <a href="mailto:mobrien@publicintegrity.org">let us know</a>.</p>
<p><em>Database design by Visible Government Online</em></p>
Henry Keralihttps://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/henry-keraliReity O'Brienhttps://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/reity-obrienChris Younghttps://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/chris-youngKytja Weirhttps://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/kytja-weirFederal judges plead guiltyhttp://www.publicintegrity.org/node/14630Judges acknowledge conflicts of interest Center found in 26 cases.Legal procedure;State court;Legal professions;United States federal judge;Judicial disqualification;Judge;Lay judge;Federal judiciary of the United States;Judicial panel;United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit;United States courts of appeals;Circuit court2014-08-05T10:39:06-04:002014-04-28T00:01:00-04:00<p>When Linda Wolicki-Gables and her husband appealed a lawsuit all the way to the second-highest court in the nation against Johnson &amp; Johnson over a malfunctioning medication pump that had been implanted in her body, the couple had no idea that one of the judges who decided their case had a financial stake in the giant multinational company.</p>
<p>Eleventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge James Hill owned as much as $100,000 in Johnson &amp; Johnson stock when he and two other judges <a href="http://www.ca11.uscourts.gov/opinions/ops/200914342.pdf">ruled against the Gables’ appeal</a> in the precedent-setting case.</p>
<p>For the Gables, a different decision in the 2011 appeal could have helped them win a verdict for as much as $20 million, a sum that would have vastly improved the quality of her care, according to their attorney, <a href="http://www.youngbloodlaw.com/id2.html">T. Patton Youngblood Jr</a>. Today, the Florida woman is a partial paraplegic, he said, largely confined to her home with only her husband to care for her.</p>
<p>The Center also found that Hill ruled on three other appeals involving companies in&nbsp;which he owned stock,&nbsp;violating clear rules governing the federal courts. In all four instances, the court rulings favored his financial interest. In a statement released by the court, Hill said he was not aware of those stock holdings at the time due to the complexity of his family’s trusts.</p>
<p>“You like to think that people will be above board but we all know that’s not the case. You can’t presume that,” said Youngblood, the Gables’ attorney. “I don’t think it’s fair that he was able to preside over this thing. I just don’t think that’s right. That’s why they ask you for disclosures so that you don’t end up presiding over cases where you have a financial or other conflict.”</p>
<p>The Center for Public Integrity uncovered Hill's&nbsp;conflicts by examining the <a href="https://www.publicintegrity.org/2014/04/22/14615/what-do-your-federal-appellate-judges-own">three most recent years of financial disclosure reports filed by 255 of the 258 judges who sit on the nation’s 13 appellate circuits</a>. In all, the Center identified 24 cases where judges owned stock in a company with a case before them. In two other instances,&nbsp;judges had financial ties with law firms working on cases over which they presided, bringing the total to 26 conflicts.</p>
<p>After the Center notified the judges of its findings, 16 judges had letters sent to the parties in all of those cases uncovered by the Center during&nbsp;the months-long investigation. The letters are the first step in possibly reopening the cases.</p>
<p>The violations occurred even though clear rules regarding conflicts of interest exist. Federal judges may not sit on cases in which they have a financial interest, according to a <a href="http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/28/455">federal law</a>. A <a href="http://www.uscourts.gov/RulesAndPolicies/CodesOfConduct/CodeConductUnitedStatesJudges.aspx">similar rule</a> is also in place in the code of conduct established by the court system. Judges have been warned before about&nbsp;participating in such cases. Following a <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/17/AR2006041701296.html"><em>Washington Post</em> investigation</a> in 2006, the courts even added a computerized screening process to help judges avoid&nbsp;conflicts.</p>
<p>Yet the problems continue.</p>
<p>The Center’s findings point to a larger issue of accountability — or lack thereof — in the federal court system. Judges face no formal punishment for breaking these rules.</p>
<p>Appellate judges can affect a company’s stock price — or even an entire industry sector — with their rulings. They are also far more likely to own stock than the average American, making it all the more important for them to avoid the perception that their holdings could influence their rulings.</p>
<p>Some judges don’t own individual stocks at all to avoid the risk of conflicting with their cases. Many judges are extremely careful in reviewing their holdings. Yet the Center’s findings show that some judges do not keep track of their own investments, even with the help of computerized databases. Sometimes they have failed to do so repeatedly, like Hill.</p>
<p>“Come on guys, this is your obligation,” said Youngblood. “You tell us all the time about ignorance being no excuse.”</p>
<p><a href="http://cumberland.samford.edu/faculty/william-g-ross">William G. Ross</a>, a Samford University law professor in Alabama who specializes in judicial ethics, said such failures undermine public confidence in the judiciary.</p>
<p>“Considering the importance of judicial integrity and avoidance of conflicts of interest, I don’t think it is asking too much of a judge to expect him or her to know what his or her holdings are,” he said. “Even judges with significant portfolios should be familiar with their own holdings.”</p>
<p><strong>Wealthy, powerful and unknown</strong></p>
<p>The Center found that 59 percent of all federal appellate judges reported owning stock, despite the risk that the companies in which they have a financial stake could come before them. By comparison, the proportion of American families who directly own stock is much lower, just 15 percent as of 2010.</p>
<p>That imbalance has grown over the past half-century, according to Ross, the Samford University professor. Like most highly paid professionals in America, federal judges have much larger and more diverse portfolios than they would have had 30 or 40 years ago, he said.</p>
<p>All told, 150 of the judges on the appellate court invested between $76 million and $226 million in more than 1,000 corporations in 2012, according to the Center’s analysis. Disclosure rules require holdings to be reported in a range.</p>
<p>Among the most commonly held stocks owned by&nbsp;appellate judges were General Electric Co. (at least $2.5 million), tech giants Intel Corp. (at least $495,000), Microsoft Corp. (at least $630,000) and IBM Corp. ($1.5 million), plus energy heavyweight ExxonMobil Corp. (at least $3.8 million) — a list that generally dovetails with most commonly held stocks among all investors.</p>
<p>The Center examined&nbsp;the finances of 161 active and 94 senior judges, who also try cases in semi-retirement. The judges must disclose their holdings annually, plus those of their spouses and any dependent children.</p>
<p>Forty-one&nbsp;percent of the judges the Center reviewed have eschewed individual stocks altogether, in some cases to deliberately avoid what one judge called the “mousetrap” of corporate stock ownership, opting instead for generally safer, if potentially&nbsp;less lucrative, investments such as mutual funds, bonds or real estate. Such investments are also less likely to interfere with a judge’s day job.</p>
<p>Unsurprisingly, judges who did not report owning individual stocks were less wealthy, on average, than their stock-owning counterparts.</p>
<p>The median value of a non-stockholding judge’s investments was between $498,000 and $1.3 million compared with stock-holding judges, who reported between $1.4 million and $4.2 million.</p>
<p>Total reported assets, including stock and other investments, for all the judges were between $585 million and $1.8 billion, according to the Center’s calculations.</p>
<p>The easiest fix to the conflict of interest problem would be to ban judges from owning stock, but that would be “an overreaction,” said&nbsp;<a href="https://its.law.nyu.edu/facultyprofiles/profile.cfm?section=bio&amp;personID=19943">Stephen Gillers</a>, a New York University law professor who specializes in legal ethics.</p>
<p>“It would be a high price to demand of people who go on to the bench that they limit their investments to government securities and mutual funds,” he said.</p>
<p>For their work in the courts, federal appellate judges earn $211,200 a year, even in retirement, a salary far greater than the average American family, which pulls in roughly $52,000 a year. Still, that’s relatively low compared to what a top-notch lawyer can make in the private sector.</p>
<p>Appellate judges’ wealth is matched by their power. Appointed for life, federal judges are an elite population removed from the general public by demographics, academic achievement and professional status. They are mostly male, mostly white and mostly 65 or older. Roughly one in five federal appellate judges graduated from Ivy League law schools, according to the Center’s analysis of Federal Judicial Center data.</p>
<p>That says nothing of their influence on the bench. Appeals court judges can&nbsp;<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/30/us/30health.html">uphold</a>&nbsp;or&nbsp;<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/appeals-court-strikes-down-health-care-laws-insurance-mandate/2011/08/12/gIQAAml1BJ_story.html">strike down</a>&nbsp;a president’s signature health care law, determine&nbsp;<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/14/us/texas-universitys-race-admissions-policy-is-debated-before-a-federal-court.html">how universities admit students</a>&nbsp;and even&nbsp;<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/01/14/d-c-circuit-court-strikes-down-net-neutrality-rules/">change the way the Internet works</a>. In the coming months, they will likely play a major role in determining&nbsp;<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/23/us/appeals-expected-to-block-more-marriage-bans-on-fast-track-to-justices.html">whether same-sex marriage becomes legal</a>&nbsp;nationwide.</p>
<p>“They are the final arbiters in all but the tiny handful of cases that the Supreme Court takes,” said&nbsp;<a href="http://www.law.pitt.edu/people/full-time-faculty/arthur-d-hellman">Arthur Hellman</a>, a University of Pittsburgh law professor and an expert on the federal court system.</p>
<p>They’re also on deck to fill vacancies on the U.S. Supreme Court.</p>
<p>But despite their considerable influence, appeals court judges are largely anonymous to the American people — even to many lawyers. News stories sometimes neglect to name the judges who participate in panels that strike down or uphold multimillion-dollar verdicts.</p>
<p>“They are largely unknown,” said Hellman, noting that most Americans couldn’t identify which circuit their state is in. “And even a pretty savvy lawyer would be hard-pressed to identify more than two or three of the judges.”</p>
<p>Still, even their less-influential decisions that never make headlines can mean the world to the parties involved.</p>
<p><strong>‘Clean hands’?</strong></p>
<p>To save his home, Mountaga Bah needed to win a legal battle with a banking giant.</p>
<p>Faced with the threat of foreclosure, Bah and his wife sued Wells Fargo Bank beginning in 2008, claiming that the bank engaged in predatory lending when it added a second mortgage to the Bowie, Md., house where they live with their three daughters.</p>
<p>Wells Fargo, his original complaint alleged, “took advantage” of Bah — a native of the West African nation of Guinea, who was not fluent in English — by failing to ensure that he would be able to afford the monthly mortgage payments. The complaint alleged the bank’s lax underwriting meant it lacked “clean hands.”</p>
<p>In 2010, a three-judge federal appellate panel confirmed a district court order in favor of Wells Fargo, dismissing Bah’s claims.</p>
<p>At the time, 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Barbara Keenan owned stock in the bank.</p>
<p>&nbsp;“I couldn’t believe it,” Bah told the Center after he learned about the judge’s conflict of interest in March. “That’s not right.”</p>
<p>Bah and his family have been able to stay in the house up until now in part because he filed for bankruptcy in 2009. But he struggles to keep up with mortgage payments to Wells Fargo and now questions the outcome in the case that had been his chance to keep his family home.</p>
<p>“Why she did this?” he said.</p>
<p>Keenan did not comment directly on the Bah foreclosure case, but the clerk of the appeals court, Patricia S. Connor, wrote in a letter that the judge was unaware of the conflict due to a “mistake in the judge’s office at the time the case was assigned.”</p>
<p>Connor noted that the value of Keenan’s holdings in Wells Fargo was $1,900.</p>
<p>Judges who own even one share of stock in a company that appears before them in court are required to disqualify themselves, according to the law.</p>
<p>Stock ownership accounted for 24 of the 26 conflicts that sparked letters from the courts to the parties in the cases where a conflict arose.</p>
<p>Some of the judges in those cases owned as few shares as Keenan while others may have owned as much as $100,000, or possibly more because some did not report value ranges for their stocks as required.</p>
<p>The remaining two conflicts the Center uncovered involved financial ties to law firms that tried cases before them, including the case of 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Jay Bybee.</p>
<p>After becoming a judge, Bybee received more than $78,000 worth of legal services from 2009 through 2012 from Davis Polk &amp; Wardwell LLP to defend him&nbsp;for actions in his prior job where he signed the so-called “<a href="http://www.justice.gov/olc/docs/memo-gonzales-aug2002.pdf">torture</a>&nbsp;<a href="http://www.justice.gov/olc/docs/memo-bybee2002.pdf">memos</a>” for the Bush administration’s Justice Department. The memos justified the controversial interrogation method of “waterboarding.”</p>
<p>Despite the help, he did not step aside in a 2010 case of a Guatemalan woman who sought asylum under the Convention Against Torture even though she was represented by a lawyer from the firm. The three-judge panel, including Bybee, affirmed the Justice Department’s denial of asylum, thus ruling against the firm that helped him. He acknowledged his failure to recuse himself in a letter sent to the parties in the case after the Center brought it to the court’s attention.</p>
<p>In addition to the 26 conflicts acknowledged by the judges, the Center found about 20 more cases that raised&nbsp;questions, but did not require automatic disqualification of judges.</p>
<p>Federal judges are required to monitor their financial portfolios so that they know when to recuse themselves from particular cases. But interviews with judges suggest that they aren’t always familiar with the stocks they own and the financial transactions they make.</p>
<p>“I don’t pay much attention to those stocks because it’s handled by a stockbroker,” said 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Peter Fay, one of the 16 judges the Center found who wrongly participated in a case. “I don’t know what he’s doing. … I sit down at the end of the year and say, ‘help me fill out this form.’”</p>
<p>For some judges, their list of investments may fill up just a few lines on their annual financial disclosure form. Other judges, however, have much more complicated&nbsp;portfolios.</p>
<p>One appeals court judge, Helene White of the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, filed a financial disclosure in 2012 that included 40 pages of financial holdings and transactions.</p>
<p>The Center found five examples in which White’s holdings overlapped with her caseload. The judge ruled in favor of her financial interests in two of them. Through letters to the involved parties, she admitted to failing to recuse herself in all five of the cases.</p>
<p>One letter said that White did not realize she owned up to $50,000 in Priceline.com stock when she sat on a three-judge panel in 2012 that&nbsp;<a href="http://www.ca6.uscourts.gov/opinions.pdf/12a0316p-06.pdf">affirmed a judgment</a>&nbsp;in favor of the company and other travel businesses. The suit had accused the travel companies of violating local tax laws by not charging occupancy taxes on customers who book hotel rooms online. The ruling set a precedent that could affect cases from other cities nationwide.</p>
<p>“I’m not sympathetic to their forgetting to check,” said&nbsp;<a href="http://www.judicialwatch.org/about/board-of-directors/">Tom Fitton</a>, president of the conservative-leaning Judicial Watch, an organization that promotes transparency in government. “It’s not that hard to do.”</p>
<p>However small the investment — and however unintentional the errors may have been — conflicted judgments loom large for litigants like the Bahs, whose family home hangs in the balance. And they reflect poorly on a court system that’s expected to uphold the law.</p>
<p>“Clearly it raises questions about impartiality and threatens to damage public perception of judges as fair and impartial,” said&nbsp;<a href="http://www.afj.org/about-afj/bios/nan-aron-2">Nan Aron</a>, the president of Alliance for Justice, a liberal advocacy group that focuses on the judicial system.</p>
<p><a href="http://info.law.indiana.edu/faculty-research/faculty-staff/profiles/faculty/geyh-charles-gardner.shtml">Charles Geyh</a>, an Indiana University law professor who specializes in judicial ethics, agreed that the conflicts present a “perception problem” for the federal courts. But he questions whether a reasonable person would think a judge’s decision on the bench would be swayed because they owned stock in a party — especially if the investment is small.</p>
<p>“It looks bad,” Geyh said. But unless a judge is a repeat offender, “I’m hesitant to refer to it as a significant problem.”</p>
<p>Federal court officials downplayed the Center’s findings.</p>
<p>David Sellers, a spokesman for the&nbsp;<a href="http://www.uscourts.gov/FederalCourts/UnderstandingtheFederalCourts/AdministrativeOffice.aspx">Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts</a>, said in an email that while federal judges take their ethical responsibilities seriously,&nbsp;the more than two dozen conflicts identified by the Center are mistakes that can be attributed to human error.</p>
<p>“It appears that a very small number of judges inadvertently were involved in cases in which they had a financial conflict,” he wrote.</p>
<p>And the judges do not rule on cases by themselves. They typically sit with at least two other judges on each case.</p>
<p>Sellers noted that the two dozen conflicted cases represented just 0.02 percent of the 109,000 total cases decided in the U.S. Courts of Appeals over the last three years. Some experts agreed that it’s important to analyze the Center’s findings in a larger context.</p>
<p>However, the Center’s search was not exhaustive. Center reporters manually searched key words from judges’ three most recent annual disclosure reports against a legal database of case rulings from 2010 to 2012. In one instance, the search led reporters to a 2014 case, as well. The analysis may undercount the actual number of times when judges’ financial ties overlapped with their work on the courts.</p>
<p>In addition, other conflicts could be hidden from view because more than 110 of the 255 judges had some information redacted from their financial disclosure reports in 2012, including information about gifts they received, income they earned and investments they held.</p>
<p><strong>A safety net with holes in it</strong></p>
<p>Guillermo Ramirez died at age 58 last year after a long fight with cancer that his family believes he contracted from a DuPont chemical he applied to his Florida strawberry fields. DuPont recalled the fungicide, Benlate, and paid him for his lost crops but said the chemical wouldn’t harm people.</p>
<p>Ramirez sued the company after he was diagnosed with the cancer that started in his kidneys and eventually spread throughout his body.</p>
<p>He did not know that Judge Joel Dubina, one of the three judges assigned to the case when it got to the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, owned up to $15,000 worth of stock in DuPont. The panel unanimously affirmed a jury verdict in favor of DuPont in 2011.</p>
<p>Now his family, including his 33-year-old daughter Veronica R. Juan, is reeling from the Center’s discovery.</p>
<p>“To them it might not have been a big deal, but for us?” Juan said. ”There are days we feel we just can’t function correctly because he was such a great person to all of us.”</p>
<p>It is puzzling to her how the judge didn’t disclose the information before taking the case. The conflict, even if it was an accidental oversight as Dubina said it was, seems all the more frustrating to Juan given the large amount of information her parents had to gather for the case, all while her father was seriously ill — so weak he could barely walk.</p>
<p>“He did everything possible to get all the information that was needed and for him to be just let down?” she said. “Who is to say what could have happened if that person wasn’t there?”</p>
<p>Conflicts of interest such as Dubina’s aren’t supposed to fall through the cracks — not in a federal court system equipped with computer databases designed to backstop judges who might fail to identify conflicts on their own.</p>
<p>In September 2006, the Judicial Conference of the United States, a group of judges who oversee and set policy for the U.S. Courts, adopted a mandatory policy requiring all federal courts — except the U.S. Supreme Court — to conduct automated screenings to help flag potential conflicts of interest.</p>
<p>The automated system, which courts began implementing in 2007, followed a number of stories in&nbsp;<em><a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/17/AR2006041701296.html">The Washington Post</a></em>&nbsp;that identified instances in which federal judges ruled on cases despite having a financial interest in one of the parties.</p>
<p>The Judicial Conference policy now requires each court to enter judges’ financial conflicts into a database that stores case information, including parties and attorneys. Judges, according to the policy, must provide the court with a list of their financial conflicts. The list must be regularly updated to ensure that nothing is missed as judges make investment transactions during the year.</p>
<p>Each court is required to screen for conflicts “on a regular schedule, including screening new matters as they are filed,” the policy states. And when the database flags a conflict, the court must notify the judge.</p>
<p>The decision on whether to recuse is ultimately up to the judge. Ethics guidelines for federal judges are very clear in some areas such as stock ownership. Beyond the bright-line, one-share rule on stock ownership, a judge must step aside from any proceeding “in which his impartiality might reasonably be questioned.”</p>
<p>Typically, court officials try to prevent judges from getting such cases in the first place by using the database to bypass judges for assignments when their financial interests match up with cases. Doing so makes it unnecessary for judges to decide themselves whether to step aside.</p>
<p>If a conflict is missed by the database, an additional screening step requires judges in all courts to check for potential conflicts after they are randomly assigned to a case.</p>
<p>But the system for flagging conflicts through both automated and manual screening is “not foolproof,” as the 4th Circuit’s&nbsp;<a href="http://www.ca4.uscourts.gov/docs/pdfs/FourthCircuitConflictScreening.pdf?sfvrsn=10">conflict-screening plan</a>&nbsp;states. After all, the automated database is only as good as the information the judges feed into it.</p>
<p>“This is a complex and sometimes fluid area,” said Sellers of the Administrative Office of the U.S Courts. “While software managed by the clerks’ office is very helpful, it is dependent on judges providing up-to-date and accurate information about their financial holdings, on staff entering that information correctly and timely, and on automated systems accurately identifying and processing the entries.”</p>
<p>Take, for example, a stock conflict involving Judge Frank Hull of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Hull sat on a panel in October 2010 that affirmed a lower court ruling in favor of Jacobs Engineering, despite the fact that the judge had purchased up to $15,000 worth of stock in the company several months before the decision.</p>
<p>The conflict slipped by several layers undetected, according to the court, in part because the judge had abbreviated the company name differently than it appeared on the court’s docket. The judge said in a statement that it had slipped through three layers of checks and she was not aware of any potential financial conflict or disqualification when she sat on the case.</p>
<p>Other judges said they ruled on cases not realizing they or their spouses had inherited stocks following a death. Some blamed their investment advisers.</p>
<p>“We’ve got a good system. I thought it worked 100 percent of the time,” 9th Circuit Judge Joseph "Jerome" Farris told the Center after learning that he ruled on a case in which he had a financial interest. “Now you are pointing out it’s only 99.9 percent.”</p>
<p>Still,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.justiceatstake.org/about/jas_staff/bert-brandenburg-executive-director/">Bert Brandenburg</a>, executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based Justice at Stake nonprofit that focuses on issues in federal and state courts, said that the system cannot continue to regularly have two dozen cases where judges acknowledge a conflict after the fact.</p>
<p>“There has to be a strong system in place to identify those conflicts in advance so the judges can step aside,” he said. “If that was a failure here, then there needs to be a strong look taken at the system.”</p>
<p>Errors do occur, and the judges and court staffers are humans who make mistakes. But ultimately, it’s up to the judges to guard against such errors.</p>
<p>And even when the cases slip through the cracks, judges can always come forward after the fact to report the mistake. They also have another chance to spot problems when they have to file their annual financial disclosure report.</p>
<p>Eleventh Circuit Judge Beverly Martin was one judge who corrected her mistake.</p>
<p>She ruled on a 2010 case in favor of an insurance company represented by her then-husband’s law firm, Sutherland Asbill &amp; Brennan LLP. As a partner in the firm, he could stand to gain financially from the decision, grounds for disqualification from a case.</p>
<p>“I just screwed up. I didn’t do it on purpose,” she said. “My husband had walked out on me the month before. I don’t remember much. I was not living with him. I was devastated. I wasn’t sleeping. I wasn’t eating. I didn’t have my presence of my mind. I shouldn’t have participated in the case.”</p>
<p>She said that although she was not financially supported by him then, she&nbsp;<a href="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/1115414-martin-2010-recusal.html">recused herself a month</a>&nbsp;after issuing the decision. The opinion she had worked on was scrapped and the case was taken up again without her.</p>
<p>A new panel of judges came to the same conclusion, affirming the lower court’s decision in favor of the insurance company represented by her now ex-husband’s firm.</p>
<p><strong>Ruling in the gray zone</strong></p>
<p>Beyond the clear conflicts, where a U.S. statute and the code of conduct for judges lay out definitive rules, is a sea of gray. It is generally up to the judges to decide if the outcome of the case could affect their finances, a system lacking transparency and any outside oversight.</p>
<p>The Center found about 20 cases in which judges had financial ties to the parties before them but there was no clear-cut violation of the rules. Those include five instances in which a married couple on the 5th Circuit, Judges Thomas Reavley and Carolyn King, ruled on cases in which parties in the cases were energy companies that paid the couple royalties for extracting minerals from their property.</p>
<p>“I don’t think that’s a problem for him or for me,” said King. “I don’t think there are any recusal issues here.”</p>
<p>Judges are not required to step aside in cases in which they own bonds in one of the parties or receive royalties from a litigant. The investments don’t represent an ownership stake in the company. Gains for the judge would be unlikely if the company’s value soars, though their investments could suffer if the company suffered financially.</p>
<p>However, according to the judicial code of conduct, judges may need to step aside in those cases “if the outcome of the proceeding could substantially affect the value” of the judges’ financial holdings. In other words, it depends on the extent to which the court’s decision could cause the investment to increase or decrease in value.</p>
<p>Judicial ethics experts said bonds and royalties pose little risk for conflicts. Unlike stocks, they would require recusal only if a “reasonable person” — not one of the litigants involved in the case — would question a judge’s impartiality. To meet that threshold, experts said, the bond investments or royalty income would have to be substantial.</p>
<p>Tenth Circuit Judge Bobby Baldock reported earning up to $50,000 in royalties from ConocoPhillips in 2011 and&nbsp;<a href="https://www.ca10.uscourts.gov/opinions/09/09-5143.pdf">ruled on a case</a>&nbsp;involving the company that was sued by its union for allegedly violating a collective bargaining agreement. The decision favored both the company and union in some aspects. The judge said the royalty payment did not require him to recuse himself, according to 10th Circuit Clerk of Court Betsy Shumaker. She said he reviewed the ethical guidelines after the Center asked about the case and is “very comfortable” with his conduct.</p>
<p>In some cases, it’s also acceptable for judges to rule on cases in which they had a clear financial stake as long as they sell the holding —&nbsp;even after filing a ruling, as the Center found in one example.</p>
<p>Ninth Circuit Judge Kim Wardlaw ruled on two such cases in 2011 and 2012 but sold the stocks, according to Clerk of Court Molly Dwyer. In one of the cases, though, she sold the stock a day after&nbsp;<a href="http://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/memoranda/2011/07/20/10-35665.pdf">the decision was filed</a>. The ruling went against the company.</p>
<p>“In both cases Judge Wardlaw promptly divested herself of the interest before these cases became final, thereby avoiding the inefficiencies caused by selecting a third judge so late in the process where that judge could not affect the outcome,” Dwyer said. She noted that&nbsp;all the judges on both cases had already voted the same way.</p>
<p>With both of those cases, Wardlaw gained money from the stock sales, according to her disclosure reports.</p>
<p>No information in the public records of the case show that she disclosed the holdings or their subsequent sale to those involved in the case. “Under the particular circumstances of those cases, she did all she was required to do,” Dwyer said.</p>
<p><strong>Few repercussions</strong></p>
<p>Breaking the&nbsp;conflict-of-interest rules can be a blow to a judge’s reputation. “For most people, that’s the worst thing you can tell them,” said King, the 5th Circuit judge.</p>
<p>But that doesn’t mean judges face any serious consequences. In fact, judges who fail to recuse themselves from cases in which they have a financial interest don’t face any formal punishment.</p>
<p>Anyone can file a complaint under the Judicial Conduct and Disability Act if they believe a judge engaged in misconduct. Of the 1,352 complaints closed in 2012 against judges on all types of federal courts nationwide, though, only one led to any corrective action,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.uscourts.gov/uscourts/Statistics/JudicialBusiness/2012/tables/S22Sep12.pdf">court statistics show</a>.</p>
<p>When courts learn about a judge’s missed disqualification after a judgment has been handed down, the courts must notify the parties involved in the case. The parties then have an opportunity to object. The court, without the disqualified judge, decides the legal consequences, if any.</p>
<p>Sometimes a case can be reheard with a new panel of judges.</p>
<p>The 26 cases the Center found moved into that legal limbo when the courts sent out letters. It’s not clear what could happen, as the conflicted judges were not the sole deciding vote in the cases. Still, the people behind the cases, such as the Gables, the Bahs and the Ramirez family, are left waiting and wondering.</p>
<p>Youngblood, the attorney who represented the Gables against Johnson &amp; Johnson, said he’d like their case to be reheard, even if he’s not optimistic it would be reversed.</p>
<p>“I didn’t like the ruling. I mean who likes a ruling that goes against them?” he said. “But I didn’t think the ruling was a fair one even though they tried to make it work according to their legal quotations and citations. I didn’t think it made sense.”</p>
<p>Bah asked for an extension on the deadline to reopen the case. He’s trying to hold on to his home for as long as he can, although the foreclosure still looms.</p>
<p>Francisca Ortega Ramirez and her three children have asked to&nbsp;reopen the case of her husband.</p>
<p>Her daughter, Veronica Juan, who translated from Spanish for her, said no amount of money could replace Guillermo Ramirez, but a financial settlement could have given him some peace of mind before he died. She said her father was worried about how his wife would fare without him.</p>
<p>Even if the case were reopened, it’s a long shot that the family would win. But Juan said her father would have wanted a fair chance at winning — without a conflicted judge — even if it meant the decision didn’t go his way.</p>
<p>&nbsp;“What is fair is fair,” she said. “He was always a fair man.”</p>
<p><em>Henry Kerali contributed to this report.</em></p>
Guillermo Ramirez did not live long enough to learn that one of the judges in his case against DuPont owned stock in the chemical company. He died last year of cancer that he and his family believed he got from a DuPont fungicide that he had applied to his strawberry fields. Now his family is wondering whether his case will be reopened due to the Center’s findings about the judge’s conflict of interest in the case. His wife, Francisca Ramirez, and children, Veronica Juan, Abdiel Ramirez and&nbsp;Erika Baca (clockwise from left), visit his grave in Tampa, Fla., in April 2014.
Reity O'Brienhttps://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/reity-obrienKytja Weirhttps://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/kytja-weirChris Younghttps://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/chris-youngInformation on judges' disclosures often blacked outhttp://www.publicintegrity.org/node/14634More than 40 percent of federal appellate judges had portions of financial disclosures blacked out.United States federal judge;Judge;Redaction;Administrative Office of the United States Courts;Rovner2014-05-19T12:19:51-04:002014-04-28T00:01:00-04:00<p>A U.S. Courts of Appeals judge earned more than $73,000 outside the courtroom in 2012 and took multiple trips on someone else’s dime in the two prior years.</p>
<p>But the mandatory financial disclosure reports of 9th Circuit Judge Carlos Bea do not make clear how he earned the money or who footed the bill for five of his trips. That’s because the information was blacked out, hiding everything from a board membership to information about some of his investments.</p>
<p>Bea, who declined to discuss his redactions via the clerk of court, is not the only federal appellate judge who had text obscured from his report. Of&nbsp;255 judges on the second-highest courts in the nation, the financial disclosure reports of 111 of them had portions that were blacked out,&nbsp;according to a Center for Public Integrity analysis.</p>
<p>If visible, the&nbsp;blacked-out information would include details about gifts they received, income they earned and investments they held. Additionally, some judges have failed to disclose the names of the companies that pay them royalties for pulling oil and gas from their property, the employment of their spouses or even the value of their investments.</p>
<p>Such gaps and deliberate redactions make it difficult for the public to determine whether the judges’ financial and community ties may improperly overlap with their work on the courts. Using the disclosure reports, the Center <a href="https://www.publicintegrity.org/2014/04/28/14630/federal-judges-plead-guilty">found 26 examples in which federal appellate judges violated the law by ruling on cases in which&nbsp;they had a financial interest</a>.</p>
<p>Those ties were visible. It’s not clear what information could be hidden behind the redacted text or missing information.</p>
<p>Judges are responsible for filling out the forms annually, so missing or incomplete information is their responsibility. Yet they and court officials say redactions are necessary to protect judges whose high-profile and often controversial rulings can leave them vulnerable to security threats.</p>
<p>“The judiciary is acutely aware of the importance of balancing the public’s right to know with that of the safety of a judge and his or her family,” said David Sellers, a spokesman for the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts.</p>
<p>But some redactions border on the absurd. For example, one judge’s disclosure removes the words “farm located at” from a property listing — a redaction that was neither requested by the judge nor seemingly necessary to protect him from threats.</p>
<p><a href="https://cumberland.samford.edu/faculty/william-g-ross">William G. Ross</a>, a Samford University law professor in Alabama who specializes in judicial ethics, said it’s not easy for the courts to determine when it’s appropriate to black out certain information. But while each redaction request should be evaluated independently, he said, litigants have a profound interest in knowing what’s in judges’ financial disclosures.</p>
<p><strong>The missing information</strong></p>
<p>A GAO&nbsp;<a href="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/1064278-2004-gao-report-on-judicial-redactions.html">report</a>&nbsp;from 2004 found nearly 600 redactions on federal judges’ reports from&nbsp;1999 to&nbsp;2002. During the three-year period, the agency reported, roughly 90 percent of the 661 redaction requests made by federal judges were granted by the judiciary. The redactions revealed in the report&nbsp;<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A40982-2004Aug4.html">raised concerns</a>&nbsp;among judicial ethics experts that the judiciary was being too lax in accepting redaction requests.</p>
<p>A decade later, the Center’s review of similar forms found that some appellate judges’ financial disclosures included just one or two redactions, while others had dozens. First Circuit Judge Michael Boudin, for example, had a total of&nbsp;<a href="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/1061182-1-boudin-michael-2012.html">189 redactions in his 19-page report</a>. In most cases, it appeared to be just a letter or two that was obscured from his investments.</p>
<p>Of the judges whose reports did contain redactions, more than nine appeared on average per report, according to the Center’s analysis.</p>
<p>The name of a university that paid into 2nd Circuit Judge Jose Cabranes’ pension plan starting in 1984 was removed. The source that reimbursed 3rd Circuit Judge Anthony Scirica for a 10-day teaching gig in Italy is blacked out. Redactions hide the source of income for 7th Circuit Judge Ann Williams’ husband, a banking executive who was also a registered lobbyist at the time.</p>
<p>Neither the judges, nor the court system, are required to explain the reasons for the redactions.</p>
<p>The post-Watergate Ethics in Government Act of 1978 required federal judges, along with legislative and executive branch officials, to publicly report their financial assets and those of&nbsp; their spouses and dependent children each year. But in 1998, Congress allowed certain sensitive information to be redacted from judges’ reports.</p>
<p>Such information can be removed either by request of the judge or by court staff if it is considered to be excess personal information not required by statute. Such information may include the names of family members, account numbers or street addresses.</p>
<p>Some information is removed because of a specific threat, Sellers said, while other information is blacked out because of the risk it could pose.</p>
<p>Judges’ redaction requests must be approved by a committee of the&nbsp;<a href="http://www.uscourts.gov/FederalCourts/JudicialConference.aspx">U.S. Judicial Conference</a>. Committee officials consult with the U.S. Marshals Service on a case-by-case basis to ensure that the judges have demonstrated a clear connection between a security risk and the information they seek to redact, Sellers said.</p>
<p>Judges do not routinely request redactions, yet such requests are almost always granted. Of the nearly 4,400 judicial financial disclosure reports released to the public in 2011, Sellers said, 154 judges’ reports were partially redacted for security reasons upon judges’ requests. Only four requests due to security issues were denied.</p>
<p>Sellers said security redactions are most commonly granted when information reveals the physical location of judges or their family members. Other requests, he said, are approved when redactions are based on “specific threats,” including those relating to identity theft.</p>
<p><strong>Security threats</strong></p>
<p>Judges do have legitimate security concerns. In 1989, 11th Circuit Judge Robert Vance was killed by a mail bomb delivered to his Alabama home.</p>
<p>The U.S. Marshals Service provides security for all federal judges, including response to threats 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Federal judges can also choose to have security systems installed in their homes at the government’s expense, according to the U.S. Marshals.</p>
<p>But another way of protecting&nbsp;judges is to hide their personal information.</p>
<p>In her 2012 financial disclosure, 7th Circuit Judge Ilana Rovner redacted the names of three different organizations — two nonprofits and a university — where she serves on boards. She also blacked out the source of a $1,800 gift she described as a “Partial Honorary Membership.” She told the Center the gift was a membership to a private social club.</p>
<p>A few years ago, Rovner said she found a man waiting for her at the social club who previously had a case before her. “In strong terms,” she said, “he wanted to know why I ruled against him.”</p>
<p>After the incident, Rovner said the U.S. Marshals suggested that she redact certain information from her financial disclosure, including the club membership. She also has the names of her board memberships blacked out, she said, because people could find out the locations and times of board meetings, then confront her.</p>
<p>“The public has every right to know every stock I own,” Rovner said. “But they don’t have the right to know where I go after hours.”</p>
<p>Rovner said she understands that threats come with the territory of being a federal judge. “I’m probably being overly cautious,” the judge added.</p>
<p>But, she said, she doesn’t think most people realize how often she and other judges receive “very odd messages” from people unhappy with their rulings.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.law.pitt.edu/people/full-time-faculty/arthur-d-hellman">Arthur Hellman</a>, a University of Pittsburgh law professor who studies the federal courts, said the security threats federal judges face are not imagined.</p>
<p>“There are threats, and they are taken seriously,” he said. “Judges are sentencing dangerous criminals. And there are lots of crazy people in our society.”</p>
<p>Since December, the Judicial Conference has withheld 1st Circuit Judge Norman Stahl’s 2012 disclosure from the Center for such security concerns, according to Kristina Usry of the U.S. Courts financial disclosure office. The conference is considering redacting Stahl’s entire form as a result of violent threats against the judge from a stalker, she said.</p>
<p><strong>Unrequested redactions</strong></p>
<p>But sometimes even judges can’t explain why their financial disclosures include redactions. Eighth Circuit Judge Diana Murphy’s 2010 financial disclosure included redactions that obscured some of her investment descriptions, as well as the amount and value of every investment.</p>
<p>“I don’t know why that would be,” Murphy told the Center. “I did not ask for the redactions.”</p>
<p>Murphy said she previously had some death threats over the years but seemed surprised that the values of her investments would be blacked out.</p>
<p>In fact, most of the redactions on judges’ reports were not requested by the judges, Sellers said. Most of them are made by court officials when judges report information that is not required by statute, such as spouse names, social security numbers and home addresses.</p>
<p>However, he said, such redactions do not involve issues related to conflicts or possible recusal by a judge.</p>
<p>It is difficult for the public to verify that, though, when the information isn’t visible.</p>
<p>But even beyond the potential for conflicts, some redactions don’t seem to have any obvious reason for being made.</p>
<p>A law clerk for 9th Circuit Judge Edward Leavy was puzzled when the Center asked about the redaction in the judge’s 2012 financial disclosure that blacked out part of the description of real estate located in Marion County, Ore. Reports from prior years had the words "Farm located at" in that space.</p>
<p>“It’s a family property where his son raises hops, so I don’t know why that would have been redacted,” said Kathleen Dodds, a longtime law clerk for the judge who helps Leavy fill out the annual financial reports.</p>
<p>She added that the judge wanted it to be known that he did not request the information to be removed. Dodds said court officials probably made the redaction because they considered the information “over-reporting.”</p>
<p>But the entry didn’t have an address, Dodds said, and much of the county is farmland. “So there’s no clear-cut reason why that was redacted,” she said.</p>
Reity O'Brienhttps://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/reity-obrienKytja Weirhttps://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/kytja-weirChris Younghttps://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/chris-youngKoch brothers, major corporations sponsor pension reform seminar for judgeshttp://www.publicintegrity.org/node/14662Judges who may decide fates of public pension reform disputes to attend seminar sponsored by pro-business interests.Financial services;Pension;Employment compensation;Pensions;Pensions crisis;Pension fund;Defined benefit pension plan;Welfare in Japan;Draft:National Conference on Public Employee Retirement Systems2014-05-19T12:19:51-04:002014-04-25T12:14:00-04:00<p>As state courts across the nation prepare to referee numerous public pension reform disputes, a gaggle of interested parties — from major corporations to the Koch brothers — will next week sponsor an expenses-paid conference on public pension reform for judges who may decide the cases’ fates.</p>
<p>Conference funders, which include ExxonMobil, Google and Wal-Mart, could benefit from efforts to slash benefits for public employees. Alternative approaches to shore up state budgets would likely require higher corporate taxes, fewer corporate subsidies and reduced government services, all of which would be bad for business.</p>
<p>The three-day gathering in a Charleston, S.C., hotel is hosted by George Mason University’s Law &amp; Economics Center.</p>
<p>The “Judicial Symposium on the Economics and Law of Public Pension Reform,” according to a George Mason <a href="http://masonlec.org/events/event/195-judicial-symposium-economics-law-public-pension-reform">event description</a>, is intended to “comprehensively outline the underlying structure of pension systems, address the differences between public and private pensions and detail the unfunded liabilities and potential bankruptcy issues arising from this crisis.”</p>
<p>In all, about three dozen corporations — Ford Motor Co., General Electric Co., ConocoPhillips, drug maker Pfizer and the Dow Chemical Company also among them — are <a href="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/1146936-george-mason-public-pension-reform-seminar-funders.html">sponsoring the conference</a>. Other funders include trade associations such as the American Petroleum Institute and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and conservative foundations such as the John William Pope Foundation and the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation.</p>
<p>Dozens of individuals are also helping bankroll the gathering; some state and federal judges themselves are listed sponsors, including Utah Judge Samuel D. McVey and Harris L. Hartz of the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.</p>
<p>It’s unclear which judges — and how many of them — will be attending the conference, although George Mason’s judicial seminars are traditionally open to both state and federal judges. George Mason does not publicly list conference attendees, and federal judges who attend privately funded educational seminars aren’t required to publicly disclose which conference they attended until 30 days after it ends.</p>
<p>Henry Butler, executive director of the Law &amp; Economics Center, did not respond to multiple requests for comment.</p>
<p>As the <a href="http://www.publicintegrity.org/">Center for Public Integrity</a> reported <a href="http://www.publicintegrity.org/2013/03/28/12368/corporations-pro-business-nonprofits-foot-bill-judicial-seminars">last year</a>, George Mason University’s Law &amp; Economics Center regularly organizes business-friendly judicial seminars.</p>
<p>The <em>Washington Post</em> <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/2014/04/12/how-google-worked-behind-the-scenes-to-invite-federal-regulators-to-conferences/">recently reported</a> that conference funders provide more than just financial support — they also help coordinate who attends the influential seminars.</p>
<p><strong>Conference agenda</strong></p>
<p>What is clear from the conference’s <a href="http://www.cvent.com/events/judicial-symposium-on-the-economics-and-law-of-public-pension-reform/agenda-330ed1fcf68a4d75a640de091f716f4b.aspx">agenda</a> is that attending judges will spend most of their time inside Charleston, S.C.’s <a href="http://www.francismarionhotel.com/">Francis Marion Hotel</a> listening to lectures and panel discussions led mainly by advocates of public pension reform. Bill Lurye, general counsel of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, stands out as one of the only panelists offering a union perspective on the pension debate.</p>
<p>Two of the conference’s featured lecturers — Todd Zywicki, a George Mason University law professor, and Eileen Norcross, a senior research fellow at George Mason University’s conservative Mercatus Center — co-wrote a 2010 <a href="http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/public-worker-pensions-rich-new-york-america-blood-article-1.203349">op-ed</a> headlined “How public worker pensions are too rich for New York’s — and America’s — blood.” The column decried unions’ efforts to thwart pension reform efforts.</p>
<p>“No one begrudges a secure retirement for police officers, firefighters and other public servants,” the authors wrote. “But unless states act now by closing insolvent plans to new hires and reducing the rate of benefit accrual for current employees, they won’t be able to shore up enough to guarantee at least some of what’s been promised.”</p>
<p>Norcross will lead an hour-long afternoon session on Monday titled “Pension Reform Options.” In 2011, Norcross <a href="http://mercatus.org/publication/state-and-municipal-debt-coming-crisis">testified</a> before the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, where she recommended that states “[f]reeze or reduce the Cost of Living Adjustment, increase the retirement age, increase contributions from workers, and, importantly close the defined benefit plan to new hires.”</p>
<p>Zywicki did not respond to requests for comment. Mercatus Center spokesman Kyle Precourt told the Center for Public Integrity in an email that Norcross is “entrenched in research now and not available for media.”</p>
<p>For a session on “Legal Questions Raised by Pension Reform,” judges will listen to Amy Monahan, a University of Minnesota law professor. Monahan, who did not respond to requests for comment, has published research disputing court rulings that state statutes establishing a pension contract between states and employees cannot legally be broken.</p>
<p>She wrote in a <a href="http://www.uiowa.edu/~ilr/issues/ILR_97-4_Monahan.pdf">2012 paper</a> that “changes to future pension accruals should be <em>legally</em> permissible absent clear and unambiguous evidence that the legislature intended to create a contract.”</p>
<p>Peter Kiernan, a New York attorney who co-wrote a <a href="http://www.rockinst.org/pdf/government_finance/2014-01-Blinken_Report_One.pdf">recent report</a> on public pensions, says arguments like these are exactly what judges will have to grapple with as pension reforms face legal challenges. In some states and cities, reforms have already reached the courts.</p>
<p>Illinois, for example, passed legislation in late 2013 that cut retirement benefits for public employees. Unions have since filed several lawsuits, claiming that the pension changes violate the Illinois Constitution, which <a href="http://www.ilga.gov/commission/lrb/con13.htm">explicitly states</a> that contractual pension benefits “shall not be diminished or impaired.”</p>
<p>Now the fate of Illinois’ pension reform efforts rests in the hands of the courts. How they rule could have nationwide implications.</p>
<p>“If the Illinois Supreme Court says that what the Illinois legislature did is constitutional and legal, then the logjam has been broken,” Kiernan said, stressing that judges will be “enormously important” in resolving the pension reform dispute. “And you’re going to see all of those states attempt reforms with respect to current employees.”</p>
<p><strong>Corporate push for public pension reform</strong></p>
<p>To be sure: Public pensions across the nation are in rotten shape. Depending on who is making the calculations — and how those calculations are being made — state and local pensions nationwide are underfunded by anywhere from nearly $1 trillion to as much as $4 trillion.</p>
<p>Some states and cities are worse off than others. Illinois and New Jersey, two of the worst, are drowning in pension debt. Detroit and other cities, meanwhile, have even filed for bankruptcy in part because their pension shortfalls are so severe.</p>
<p>“Reform is necessary because it is creating an unsustainable burden on taxpayers,” said Todd Maisch, executive vice president of the Illinois Chamber of Commerce.</p>
<p>&nbsp;In Illinois, “I don’t think you fix the mess without pension reform,” he said.</p>
<p>Government officials find themselves left with difficult choices: Raise taxes and cut services to help increase their annual contributions to beleaguered pension funds, change the terms of public employee pensions to help lower the burden on state and local budgets, or do a little of both.</p>
<p>Reform advocates contend that public employees are enjoying lavish retirement benefits that are handcuffing states and bankrupting cities. They argue that states and municipalities should cut pensions for current and future employees. In some cases, that means shifting workers from employee-friendly defined-benefit plans to plans that more closely resemble private-sector 401(k) plans.</p>
<p>Public workers and their unions, too, have cried foul, arguing that their retirement benefits are far from extravagant and that attempts to change the terms of their pensions violate agreements they previously reached with state and local governments.</p>
<p>David Sirota, a liberal writer and commentator, wrote a <a href="http://y.ourfuture.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Plot-Against-Pensions-final.pdf">2013 report</a> called “The Plot against Pensions,” which argued that “conservative activists are manufacturing the perception of a public pension crisis in order to slash modest retiree benefits and preserve expensive corporate subsidies and tax breaks.”</p>
<p>While public pensions face a $46 billion annual shortfall, the report found, it is “dwarfed by the $80 billion a year states and cities spend on corporate subsidies.”</p>
<p>“We are having a debate over pension shortfalls, calling them an emergency, when in fact they are in aggregate far smaller than what is spent each year on subsidies to business,” Sirota told the Center for Public Integrity. “And business likes that imbalance.”</p>
<p>Critics of pension reform worry that corporations and conservative lawmakers are winning a public relations battle intended to demonize public pensions while ignoring the broader scope of budget shortfalls.</p>
<p>Hank Kim, executive director of the National Conference on Public Employee Retirement Systems, said he’s tired of pension reform advocates claiming that state and local municipalities can only overcome their fiscal problems on the backs of public workers.</p>
<p>“If it’s really about ‘shared sacrifice,’ which is the terminology folks have been using since the Great Recession, it occurs to us that the groups that aren’t sharing the sacrifice are the wealthy and the corporations because they’re still getting the tax breaks,” he said. “You can’t be crying poverty when you are still giving away the shop to corporations.”</p>
<p>But a combination of higher taxes and poorer services could prompt businesses to move, said Patrick McGuinn, a political science professor at Drew University and author of a <a href="http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/research/files/papers/2014/02/26%20public%20pension%20reform/pension%20politics_final_225.pdf">February report</a> about the politics of pension reform.</p>
<p>“When you’re cutting things like education or health care or investment in transportation or technology, those are things that, to varying degrees, are going to affect corporations,” he said.</p>
<p>With so much at stake for businesses, some worry what kind of influence a corporate-funded conference might have on judges whose rulings could resolve the pension debate.</p>
<p>Sirota, for one, said the conference hosted by George Mason’s Law &amp; Economics Center is “an effort to lobby judges.”</p>
<p>“It’s crossing a line that’s not supposed to be crossed,” he said. “What’s next? Is a company going to be able to hire a lobbyist to go lobby a judge in chambers?”</p>
<p>Probably not.</p>
<p>But what’s next for judges certainly includes another conference on public pension reform hosted by George Mason’s Law &amp; Economics Center. It’s scheduled for September in San Francisco.</p>
Illinois state union members and supporters rally for fair pension reform at the Illinois State Capitol in Springfield, January 2013.
Chris Younghttps://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/chris-youngD.C. mulls changes to judicial transparencyhttp://www.publicintegrity.org/node/14120Local judicial commission mulls disclosure reforms after Center for Public Integrity investigation on judges&#039; finances.United States federal judge;STOCK Act2014-05-19T12:19:51-04:002014-01-15T17:07:00-05:00<p>A District of Columbia judicial oversight commission could soon recommend changes that would force District judges to reveal more details about their personal finances.</p>
<p>The D.C. Commission on Judicial Disabilities and Tenure’s potential recommendations follow a Center for Public Integrity&nbsp;<a href="http://www.publicintegrity.org/2013/12/04/13808/state-supreme-court-judges-reveal-scant-financial-information">investigation</a>&nbsp;that ranks the financial disclosure requirements for D.C. judges among the worst in the nation. &nbsp;</p>
<p>But reforms may not come quickly, if at all: Any commission recommendation would require congressional approval,&nbsp;according to the commission and other D.C. officials.</p>
<p>At this juncture, discussions among members of the Commission on Judicial Disabilities and Tenure “are still very preliminary,” said Cathaee Hudgins, the body’s executive director.</p>
<p>But during its monthly meeting on Jan. 8, the commission “had a very lengthy discussion” about the District’s financial disclosure requirements, Hudgins confirmed.</p>
<p>Hudgins said the commission will continue its discussion about D.C.’s financial disclosure requirements at its February meeting. So for now, she said, “we’re not going to start knocking on doors in Congress.”</p>
<p>Indeed, any changes recommended by the Commission on Judicial Disabilities and Tenure must be enacted by Congress, as the D.C. City Council does not have the authority to act on changes proposed by the commission,&nbsp;council officials confirmed.</p>
<p>Judges who preside over cases for the District of Columbia Courts get paid by the federal government. But when it comes to publicly disclosing how they invest their paychecks, D.C. judges aren’t held to the same standard as their counterparts on the federal bench.</p>
<p>Federal judges’ disclosures are fairly extensive. The reports filed by D.C. judges? Not so much.</p>
<p>The Center for Public Integrity <a href="https://www.publicintegrity.org/2013/12/04/13725/district-columbia-earns-f-judicial-financial-disclosure">gave the District</a> an “F” for its poor judicial disclosure law and ranked it tied for 47th among state high courts nationwide.</p>
<p>Only three states — Montana, Idaho and Utah — scored worse. That’s because those states don’t require judges to publicly report any information about their personal finances. (In light of the Center’s report, however, Montana’s Supreme Court recently&nbsp;<a href="http://www.publicintegrity.org/2014/01/09/14087/montana-proposes-reforms-after-earning-f-judicial-disclosure">issued an order</a>&nbsp;requiring judges to file the same financial disclosures as other statewide officials.)</p>
<p>The District scored so poorly because the vast majority of the personal financial information that judges report to the Commission on Judicial Disabilities and Tenure is kept hidden from the public. Only two of the disclosure form’s 10 sections — “Business and Charitable Affiliations” and “Honorarium” — are open for public inspection. The rest, including non-judicial income, investments and gifts, is kept confidential and only reviewed internally by the Commission, an agency in charge of disciplining judges.</p>
<p>Financial reports filed by&nbsp;<a href="https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/710481/roberts-2012-2012.pdf">federal judges</a>, including U.S. Supreme Court justices, publicly disclose everything from non-judicial income and investments to gifts and reimbursements. Some states require similar levels of public disclosure.</p>
<p>In a phone interview, Hudgins told the Center for Public Integrity that the Commission on Judicial Disabilities and Tenure, whose meetings are closed to the public, specifically discussed how D.C.’s financial disclosure requirements compared to those in&nbsp;<a href="http://www.publicintegrity.org/2013/12/04/13721/california-earns-c-judicial-financial-disclosure">California</a>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<a href="http://www.publicintegrity.org/2013/12/04/13737/maryland-earns-c-judicial-financial-disclosure">Maryland</a>, states whose disclosure rules scored the highest marks in the Center for Public Integrity’s report.</p>
<p>She said commissioners were “surprised” to learn that California, Maryland and other states made public every section of their financial disclosure reports, including sections where judges disclose investments and liabilities.</p>
<p>“We didn’t realize that the whole reports were public,” Hudgins said.</p>
<p>If D.C. released the entirety of its judges’ financial interest reports, the District would earn 65 points instead of 15&nbsp;out of 100 possible points. That would raise its grade from an “F” to a “D” and — even with that mediocre score — rank it among the top five states for judicial disclosure, according to the Center for Public Integrity’s grading system.</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
Chris Younghttps://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/chris-youngState judges: We don't need no stinkin' disclosurehttp://www.publicintegrity.org/node/13990Officials defend limited financial disclosure for high court judges. Law enforcement;State court;Legal professions;United States federal judge;Judge;Lay judge;Judicial officers of the Republic of Singapore2014-05-19T12:19:51-04:002013-12-13T06:00:00-05:00<p>State&nbsp;officials blasted&nbsp;The Center for Public Integrity’s report on how difficult it is to learn about the financial holdings of state supreme court judges, while the reaction from some newspapers was a call for reform.</p>
<p>The <a href="https://www.publicintegrity.org/2013/12/04/13808/state-supreme-court-judges-reveal-scant-financial-information">nine-month investigation</a> reported that 42 states and the District of Columbia received a failing grade in a Center evaluation of disclosure requirements for high court judges. Not a single state did better than the federal government when it comes to revealing the financial holdings of top judges.</p>
<p>Stories appeared in more than 50 news outlets in more than 40 states and in several national publications.&nbsp;It also was featured on C-SPAN and numerous radio stations.</p>
<p><strong>No trouble here</strong></p>
<p><a href="http://www.publicintegrity.org/2013/12/04/13743/montana-earns-f-judicial-financial-disclosure">Montana</a> has zero disclosure for judges, one of three states (the other two being Idaho and Utah) with that dubious distinction. Despite that, Chief Justice Mike McGrath didn’t see a problem.</p>
<p>He <a href="http://www.greatfallstribune.com/viewart/20131206/NEWS01/312060030/Montana-chief-justice-Financial-disclosures-unnecessary">told the Associated Press</a> that by following a strictly enforced code of judicial conduct, the court has “moved sort of beyond mere disclosure.”</p>
<p>“We have a code that is quite strict and it specifically requires judges to disqualify themselves if they have any kind of an economic interest, or any member of their family has an economic interest,” McGrath said.</p>
<p>It’s basically the “trust me” argument, which was fairly common among critics.</p>
<p>The <em>Great Falls Tribune</em>, <a href="http://www.greatfallstribune.com/article/20131210/OPINION/312100005/Supreme-Court-should-disclose-data?nclick_check=1">in an editorial</a>, wasn’t so trusting, arguing that “transparency would be enhanced by requiring Montana’s Supreme Court judges, the most powerful state judges, to disclose their financial interests and those of members of their immediate family.”</p>
<p>The <em>Billings Gazette</em> agreed. Its <a href="http://billingsgazette.com/news/opinion/editorial/gazette-opinion/gazette-opinion-building-confidence-in-courts-of-last-resort/article_efb93625-8a0b-52cf-83b0-6c2a8282c8b9.html">editorial</a> urged the state legislature to enact laws so judges face the same disclosure requirements as other statewide officials.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.publicintegrity.org/2013/12/04/13732/iowa-earns-f-judicial-financial-disclosure">Iowa</a>&nbsp;officials were <a href="http://thegazette.com/2013/12/06/iowa-legislators-lawyers-scoff-at-integrity-grade/">similarly unperturbed.</a>&nbsp;The state earned 17.5 points out of 100.</p>
<p>“The Center’s report and rating as applied to Iowa judges appears to be a solution in search of a problem,” said Guy Cook, president of the Iowa State Bar Association and a Des Moines lawyer. Sen. Rob Hogg, chairman of Senate Judiciary Committee, said the state’s court system is of the “highest integrity.”</p>
<p>Iowa had one of the oddest rules — judges “are allowed to receive gifts worth any amount on their wedding or 25th and 50th wedding anniversaries.” Cook told an Iowa newspaper that the rule applies to employees of the judicial branch, not judges.</p>
<p>We double-checked. He’s wrong.</p>
<p>John Goerdt, Iowa’s deputy state court administrator, confirmed to the Center that the section of the code of conduct clearly refers to judges. Cook did not respond to a phone call, and <a href="http://thegazette.com/2013/12/06/iowa-legislators-lawyers-scoff-at-integrity-grade/"><em>The Gazette</em></a> deleted his comment.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.publicintegrity.org/2013/12/04/13758/south-dakota-earns-f-judicial-financial-disclosure">South Dakota</a> Chief Justice David Gilbertson also said the Center’s report was “a solution looking for a problem,” according to <em><a href="http://www.argusleader.com/article/20131204/NEWS/312040052/S-D-most-other-states-fail-judicial-disclosure">The Argus Leader</a></em>.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.publicintegrity.org/2013/12/04/13757/south-carolina-earns-f-judicial-financial-disclosure">South Carolina</a> Chief Justice Jean Toal called the Center’s study “very flawed,” according to <em><a href="http://www.thestate.com/2013/12/04/3137683/report-gives-sc-an-f-for-disclosure.html">The State</a></em>. “That is a viewpoint shared by every chief justice in the country,” she told the Columbia newspaper.</p>
<p>The state scored 40 points in the survey.</p>
<p>Chip Campsen, a Republican state senator from Charleston who sits on the state’s Judicial Merit Selection Commission, told <em><a href="http://www.postandcourier.com/article/20131204/PC1610/131209763/1009/national-report-highlights-strengths-and-weaknesses-of-state-justices-x2019-financial-disclosures&amp;source=RSS">The Post and Courier</a></em> that an internal vetting system and the judicial code of conduct are adequate checks on potential judicial corruption.</p>
<p>“It’s not just the wild, wild West with judges sitting there unimpeded, making rulings on cases that they may have an interest with,” Campsen said. “There are protections in place.”</p>
<p>The Center gave South Carolina a failing grade largely because the materials available to the commission — documents that shed light on Supreme Court justices’ personal finances — are sealed. The information that is made public does not shed much light on judges’ personal finances.</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p><strong>Attacking the messenger</strong></p>
<p>Bill Gang, spokesman for the&nbsp;<a href="http://www.publicintegrity.org/2013/12/04/13745/nevada-earns-f-judicial-financial-disclosure">Nevada</a>&nbsp;Supreme Court (42.5 points),&nbsp;<a href="http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2013/dec/04/nevada-among-many-states-get-f-grade-rules-judicia/">called the report</a>&nbsp;"somewhat misleading” in the&nbsp;<em>Las Vegas Sun</em>.</p>
<p>“The fact that 84 percent of the state court systems received a failing grade while none received a grade higher than C suggests that the test is not neutral,” he said.</p>
<p>He did not elaborate on what he meant by “neutral.”</p>
<p>He also critiqued the Center’s point system that sought information about the finances of judges’ spouses and dependent children, saying Nevada could not pass because it does not seek such information.</p>
<p>Judicial experts told the Center that family members’ financial interests are crucial to understanding the full picture of judges’ finances.</p>
<p>In the&nbsp;<em>Concord Monitor</em>,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.publicintegrity.org/2013/12/04/13746/new-hampshire-earns-f-judicial-financial-disclosure">New Hampshire</a>&nbsp;(48 points) state courts spokeswoman Carole Alfano&nbsp;<a href="http://www.concordmonitor.com/news/localstate/9617728-95/center-for-public-integrity-gives-nh-an-f-for-supreme-court-financial-disclosures">made a similar point</a>&nbsp;about the alarming failure rate.</p>
<p>"New Hampshire has strong disclosure, and no one currently is asking for the judicial forms to be changed,” she said. “If CPI had taken a different tack on it — maybe, ‘Here’s some suggestions we have’— the court may have listened. But the flat-out F isn’t helpful, and it isn’t terribly legitimate.”</p>
<p>The Center doesn’t advocate for reforms; we report what we find. And we did share our results with the court prior to publication.</p>
<p>New Jersey’s court spokeswoman Winnie Comfort&nbsp;<a href="http://www.law.com/jsp/nj/PubArticleNJ.jsp?id=1202630726496&amp;thepage=3&amp;slreturn=20131111113809">told the&nbsp;<em>New Jersey Law Journal</em></a>&nbsp;there were two "red flags" that cast doubt on the report’s findings.</p>
<p>Points were subtracted for not asking about judges' outside income even though the New Jersey Constitution prohibits outside employment for judges, she said. The Center did give the state credit for reporting judges’ income because they disclose their court jobs, but we docked points because judges were not required to disclose the amounts of their judicial salaries.</p>
<p>In addition, Comfort said the state was wrongly criticized for asking only about real estate in Atlantic City, a question intended to screen out conflicts relating to the heavily regulated casino industry.</p>
<p>Comfort noted the form does seek information on rental&nbsp;income, regardless of the location of the property. The Center updated the&nbsp;<a href="http://www.publicintegrity.org/2013/12/04/13747/new-jersey-earns-f-judicial-financial-disclosure">New Jersey</a>&nbsp;survey to note the inclusion, though the change did not result in a higher&nbsp;score (34 points).</p>
<p>The information sought is limited, though, and does not cover property that is not rented but lies outside of Atlantic City. Land that is being developed or farmed, for example, would not need to be reported if no rent was being collected.</p>
<p><strong>Room for improvement?</strong></p>
<p>There were also a few calls for reform.</p>
<p>“<a href="http://www.publicintegrity.org/2013/12/04/13757/south-carolina-earns-f-judicial-financial-disclosure">South Carolina</a>'s judicial ethics standards are clearly lacking,”&nbsp;<a href="http://www.postandcourier.com/article/20131208/PC1002/131209448/1021/bolster-judicial-disclosures&amp;source=RSS">noted&nbsp;<em>The Post and Courier</em></a>&nbsp;in an editorial. “They should address conflicts that might arise from judges' investments and financial liabilities, just as those for elected officials should. Adjustments to state requirements should be made as soon as possible.”</p>
<p>Another appeal for more transparent state judiciaries came from&nbsp;<a href="http://www.publicintegrity.org/2013/12/04/13741/mississippi-earns-f-judicial-financial-disclosure">Mississippi</a>, a state that has seen the confidence in its system “rocked by judicial bribery scandals.”</p>
<p>A columnist from&nbsp;<em>The Clarion-Ledger&nbsp;</em>in Jackson&nbsp;<a href="http://www.clarionledger.com/article/20131205/COL0603/312050022/Judges-gifts-fairness-don-t-mix?odyssey=mod%7Cnewswell%7Ctext%7CHome%7Cp">wrote</a>, “We hope judges will always do the honorable thing and step aside when there is a hint of a possible conflict, but we need to have strong requirements in place to ensure those in the judiciary aren’t unduly influenced by outside interests.”</p>
<p>The online&nbsp;<a href="http://newmexico.watchdog.org/19869/new-mexico-supreme-court-gets-an-f-in-disclosures/">New Mexico Watchdog</a>&nbsp;suggested that the legislature consider addressing a gap in state law that an official said limited&nbsp;<a href="http://www.publicintegrity.org/2013/12/04/13748/new-mexico-earns-f-judicial-financial-disclosure">New Mexico</a>&nbsp;from posting the state’s disclosures online, as the Center noted in the report.</p>
<p>The gaps in state disclosure requirements are easily correctable, noted an&nbsp;<a href="http://thetimes-tribune.com/opinion/give-public-data-to-judge-1.1596966">editorial</a>&nbsp;from&nbsp;<em>The Times-Tribune&nbsp;</em>in Scranton, Pa. The piece urged&nbsp;<a href="http://www.publicintegrity.org/2013/12/04/13755/pennsylvania-earns-d-judicial-financial-disclosure">Pennsylvania</a>&nbsp;Chief Justice Ronald D. Castille to “embrace the opportunity, given a long series of scandals that have diminished public confidence in the courts.”</p>
<p>The<em>&nbsp;<a href="http://blogs.houstonpress.com/hairballs/2013/12/texas_gets_an_f_center_for_pub.php">Houston Press</a></em>&nbsp;asked why states don’t simply adopt the federal rule.</p>
<p>“Besides the necessity of the public trust in the state judicial system — which far more people participate in than the federal court system — there simply cannot be differing sets of rules for players in the judicial system depending on if one is chummy with a judge (most people aren't),” the paper wrote. “The&nbsp;<a href="http://www.publicintegrity.org/2013/12/04/13760/texas-earns-f-judicial-financial-disclosure">Texas</a>&nbsp;Legislature and the Texas Ethics Commission are on notice.”</p>
<p><strong>Other comments</strong></p>
<p>The&nbsp;<a href="http://www.publicintegrity.org/2013/12/04/13725/district-columbia-earns-f-judicial-financial-disclosure">District of Columbia</a>&nbsp;(15 points) has great disclosure rules. Unfortunately, the public can only see two of the 10 sections on the forms. In a story on NPR affiliate WAMU-FM, a court representative&nbsp;<a href="http://wamu.org/news/13/12/04/dc_received_failing_grade_for_financial_disclosures_by_judges">said it’s not the fault of the judges</a>. Congressional statute governs what information the district makes public.</p>
<p>That was a common refrain in a number of states, which note that changes to financial disclosure requirements are left to state legislatures.</p>
<p>An&nbsp;<a href="http://www.publicintegrity.org/2013/12/04/13717/alabama-earns-f-judicial-financial-disclosure">Alabama</a>&nbsp;ethics official&nbsp;<a href="http://blog.al.com/wire/2013/12/center_for_public_integrity_gi.html">made a good point</a>, using an old Center study to refute the new Center study. When grading state legislatures, researchers in 2009 ranked the requirements tops in the nation, said Jim Sumner, director of the Ethics Commission, in the&nbsp;<em>Birmingham News</em>. Justices are required to fill out the same report.</p>
<p>Alabama got 45.5 points.</p>
<p>The standards were a bit tougher this time because the Center opted to use federal disclosure forms as the basis for comparison. The federal forms, however, still aren’t that great — scoring 84 points. Judges report investments in a wide range and the forms are not available online.</p>
<p>California, which was&nbsp;<a href="http://www.publicintegrity.org/2013/12/04/13808/state-supreme-court-judges-reveal-scant-financial-information">featured prominently</a>&nbsp;in the Center’s story, took issue with the&nbsp;<a href="http://www.publicintegrity.org/2013/12/04/13721/california-earns-c-judicial-financial-disclosure">state summary</a>, noting that one conflict really shouldn’t have been considered a conflict.</p>
<p>California judges are not required to disqualify themselves from cases when they have a financial interest in a company that files a “friend-of-the-court” brief. Cathal Conneely told the Center in an email that such briefs might be abused by attorneys seeking to remove judges from particular cases.</p>
<p>In Connecticut’s&nbsp;<a href="http://www.publicintegrity.org/2013/12/04/13723/connecticut-earns-f-judicial-financial-disclosure">state summary</a>, the Center wrote that the state “does not require judges to report any income information for spouses or dependent children.”</p>
<p>Melissa Farley, executive director of the external affairs division of the Connecticut Judicial Branch, pointed out that the state does require judges to report financial information, including income, about their spouses and dependent children, but the information is not made public.</p>
<p>Family members’ financial information “is confidential unless there is an investigation started by the Supreme Court or the Judicial Review Council,” Farley said.</p>
<p>The Center only gave credit for publicly available information.</p>
<p>After publication, we learned that&nbsp;<a href="http://www.publicintegrity.org/2013/12/04/13718/alaska-earns-f-judicial-financial-disclosure">Alaska</a>&nbsp;(58.3 points) requires judges to fill out a second form that contains much of the same information as the one we based our grade on. We’ve included those&nbsp;<a href="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/889226-ak-court-filings-2012.html">2012 reports here</a>.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.publicintegrity.org/2013/12/04/13756/rhode-island-earns-f-judicial-financial-disclosure">Rhode Island</a>’s court spokesman Craig Berke told the&nbsp;<em><a href="http://www.providencejournal.com/breaking-news/content/20131208-political-scene-r.i.-supreme-court-gets-an-f-for-financial-disclosure.ece">Providence Journal</a></em>&nbsp;he was unsurprised by the Center’s findings, but questioned the project’s utility.&nbsp;The state scored 56.5.</p>
<p>“Rhode Island ranked 13th from the top and still it got an ‘F’,” Berke said. “We don’t understand the methodology, and we are not sure of its usefulness.”</p>
<p>John Marion, executive director of Common Cause Rhode Island, said there is “definitely room for improvement” in the Supreme Court’s current system but it&nbsp;"still has greater breadth and consistency than most.”</p>
<p>“But that may come at the cost of its depth, ” he added.</p>
<p>In&nbsp;<a href="http://www.publicintegrity.org/2013/12/04/13762/vermont-earns-f-judicial-financial-disclosure">Vermont</a>&nbsp;(32 points), the findings didn’t surprise advocates who pointed out to&nbsp;<a href="http://www.wcax.com/story/24186647/vt-gets-f-on-financial-disclosure-for-supreme-court-justices">WCAX 13</a>&nbsp;that the state&nbsp;is one of&nbsp;four that does not require financial reporting for statewide political candidates.</p>
<p>"It's far more important, frankly, to concentrate on candidates running for state office here," said Paul Burns of the Vermont Public Interest Research Group.</p>
<p>The Center found that&nbsp;<a href="http://www.publicintegrity.org/2013/12/04/13766/wisconsin-earns-f-judicial-financial-disclosure">Wisconsin</a>&nbsp;Justice Ann Walsh Bradley had participated in a 2011 case involving Nestle USA. In response, Bradley told the&nbsp;<em><a href="http://www.jsonline.com/blogs/news/234468661.html">Milwaukee Journal&nbsp;Sentinel</a></em>&nbsp;that she owned stock in the multinational Nestle based in Switzerland, not the Nestle USA named in the lawsuit.</p>
<p>“I am in full compliance with our code of judicial conduct," she said. "This investment is a tiny, tiny piece of a multinational company and its stock is in my IRA. And I do not participate in the management of the stock."</p>
<p>Nestle USA is a subsidiary of the Nestle company in which Bradley owns stock, meaning it is one and the same company, according to&nbsp;Nestle spokesman Ian Metcalfe.</p>
Montana Supreme Court&nbsp;Chief Justice Mike McGrath
John Dunbarhttps://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/john-dunbarReity O'Brienhttps://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/reity-obrienKytja Weirhttps://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/kytja-weirChris Younghttps://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/chris-youngConnecticut earns ‘F’ for judicial financial disclosurehttp://www.publicintegrity.org/node/13723We graded each state on judicial financial disclosure.2014-05-19T12:19:51-04:002013-12-04T00:01:00-05:00<div class="stateSupremeCourtDisclosure">
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<div class="stateFace">G</div>
<p class="intro">The Center for Public Integrity <a href="//www.publicintegrity.org/2013/12/04/13808/state-supreme-court-judges-reveal-scant-financial-information">evaluated the disclosure rules</a> for
judges in the highest state courts nationwide. The <a href="//www.publicintegrity.org/2013/12/04/13809/methodology-how-we-graded-state-supreme-court-financial-disclosure">level of disclosure</a> in
the 50 states and the District of Columbia was poor, with <a href="//www.publicintegrity.org/2013/12/04/13805/how-states-scored-judicial-financial-disclosures">43 receiving failing grades</a>,
making it difficult for the public to identify potential conflicts of interest
on the bench. Despite the lack of information in the public records, the
Center’s investigation found nearly three dozen <a href="//www.publicintegrity.org/2013/12/04/13815/justices-ruled-their-own-financial-interests">conflicts</a>,
questionable gifts and entanglements among top judges around the country.
Here’s what the Center found in Connecticut:</p>
<div class="profile">
<div class="gradeContainer" data-state="Connecticut"></div>
<h4>Strengths:</h4>
<p>Connecticut’s judges are required to report the source and exact amount
of any compensation they receive beyond their judicial salaries. The state
also asks for disclosure of travel reimbursements from sponsors of conferences
or speeches.</p>
<h4>Weaknesses:</h4>
<p>Connecticut does not require judges to report any income information for
spouses or dependent children. Failing to require disclosure for family
members also cost the state points in the investments category, in which
judges must name each security they owned or sold during the reporting
year. Connecticut scored zero points in both the gifts and liabilities
sections. Although Connecticut does not require judges to report gifts
they receive, the state imposes some restrictions on what kinds of gifts
public officials, including judges, can accept and from whom they can receive
them. Additionally, Connecticut only earned half credit in the accountability
category. While the state’s <a href="http://www.ct.gov/JRC/site/default.asp">Judicial
Review Council</a> has the authority to investigate and suspend judges
for up to one year for violating financial disclosure rules, any suspension
beyond one year must be approved by the state Supreme Court itself, leaving
the fate of an accused judge up to his or her peers on the bench.</p>
<h4>Highlights:</h4>
<p>In 2007, Justice Chase Rogers <a href="http://www.newstimes.com/news/article/Former-chief-justice-recuses-self-from-gay-55124.php">recused
herself</a>
from hearing a same-sex marriage case because her husband’s
law firm had previously filed a friend-of-the-court brief on behalf of
a legal organization in support of gay marriage in the case. Rogers acted
ethically by sitting out the case, but the public never would have been
able to identify the judge’s conflict on its own. That’s because, unlike
some states, Connecticut does not require judges to report their spouse’s
non-investment income.</p>
</div>
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type="text/javascript"></script>Chris Zubak-Skeeshttps://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/chris-zubak-skeesReity O'Brienhttps://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/reity-obrienKytja Weirhttps://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/kytja-weirChris Younghttps://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/chris-youngMichigan earns ‘F’ for judicial financial disclosurehttp://www.publicintegrity.org/node/13739We graded each state on judicial financial disclosure.2014-05-19T12:19:51-04:002013-12-04T00:01:00-05:00<div class="stateSupremeCourtDisclosure">
<div class="page">
<div class="stateFace">V</div>
<p class="intro">The Center for Public Integrity <a href="//www.publicintegrity.org/2013/12/04/13808/state-supreme-court-judges-reveal-scant-financial-information">evaluated the disclosure rules</a> for
judges in the highest state courts nationwide. The <a href="//www.publicintegrity.org/2013/12/04/13809/methodology-how-we-graded-state-supreme-court-financial-disclosure">level of disclosure</a> in
the 50 states and the District of Columbia was poor, with <a href="//www.publicintegrity.org/2013/12/04/13805/how-states-scored-judicial-financial-disclosures">43 receiving failing grades</a>,
making it difficult for the public to identify potential conflicts of interest
on the bench. Despite the lack of information in the public records, the
Center’s investigation found nearly three dozen <a href="//www.publicintegrity.org/2013/12/04/13815/justices-ruled-their-own-financial-interests">conflicts</a>,
questionable gifts and entanglements among top judges around the country.
Here’s what the Center found in Michigan:</p>
<div class="profile">
<div class="gradeContainer" data-state="Michigan"></div>
<h4>Strengths:</h4>
<p>Michigan seeks limited information about judicial campaign contributions
on its annual financial disclosure forms, a rarity among state requirements.
The secretary of state’s office separately catalogs much more extensive
information about campaigns, but the disclosure on the court forms gives
a summary of the costs of the campaigns.</p>
<h4>Weaknesses:</h4>
<p>Michigan scored near the bottom, at 44th place, because its one-page form
does not seek any information about judges’ investments or liabilities.
Information about spouses or dependent children is not required either.</p>
<h4>Highlights:</h4>
<p>Former Justice Diane Hathaway is currently serving a 366-day sentence
after pleading guilty to bank fraud in January 2013 for hiding her ownership
of a home in Florida to reduce how much she had to pay a bank during a
short sale of a Michigan home. <a href="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/805539-mi-hathaway-diane-all.html">Her
financial disclosures from her time on the bench</a> do not list any property
holdings because the state does not ask for such information.</p>
</div>
<div class="reports" data-state="Michigan"></div>
<div class="card" data-state="Michigan"></div>
</div>
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type="text/javascript"></script>Chris Zubak-Skeeshttps://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/chris-zubak-skeesReity O'Brienhttps://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/reity-obrienKytja Weirhttps://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/kytja-weirChris Younghttps://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/chris-youngPennsylvania earns ‘D’ for judicial financial disclosurehttp://www.publicintegrity.org/node/13755We graded each state on judicial financial disclosure.2014-05-19T12:19:51-04:002013-12-04T00:01:00-05:00<div class="stateSupremeCourtDisclosure">
<div class="page">
<div class="stateFace">l</div>
<p class="intro">The Center for Public Integrity <a href="//www.publicintegrity.org/2013/12/04/13808/state-supreme-court-judges-reveal-scant-financial-information">evaluated the disclosure rules</a> for
judges in the highest state courts nationwide. The <a href="//www.publicintegrity.org/2013/12/04/13809/methodology-how-we-graded-state-supreme-court-financial-disclosure">level of disclosure</a> in
the 50 states and the District of Columbia was poor, with <a href="//www.publicintegrity.org/2013/12/04/13805/how-states-scored-judicial-financial-disclosures">43 receiving failing grades</a>,
making it difficult for the public to identify potential conflicts of interest
on the bench. Despite the lack of information in the public records, the
Center’s investigation found nearly three dozen <a href="//www.publicintegrity.org/2013/12/04/13815/justices-ruled-their-own-financial-interests">conflicts</a>,
questionable gifts and entanglements among top judges around the country.
Here’s what the Center found in Pennsylvania:</p>
<div class="profile">
<div class="gradeContainer" data-state="Pennsylvania"></div>
<h4>Strengths:</h4>
<p>Pennsylvania was one of only eight states to post a passing grade in the
Center’s study. The state earned 17 out of 20 points in the gifts/reimbursements
category. Judges are required to disclose who gave gifts to them, their
spouses or any dependent children and the exact value of the items. The
same requirements apply for reimbursements for travel and other expenses,
although the state lost points because it does not require judges to provide
a description of the reimbursements. Pennsylvania scored 15 out of 20 points
in the outside income category because the state requires judges to report
their sources of income, including income earned by their spouses. Judges
must also report any honoraria they receive. But the Keystone State lost
five points because judges aren’t required to report how much income they
earn from each source.</p>
<h4>Weaknesses:</h4>
<p>Judges must disclose real estate interests, but there are no requirements
for them to disclose stocks or other investments. Pennsylvania also scored
poorly in the liabilities section, because the state requires judges to
report only their creditors’ names and the interest rates of their liabilities.
The state does not require judges to describe the liability or provide
its dollar value.</p>
<h4>Highlights:</h4>
<p>Justice Seamus McCaffery and his wife, Lisa Rapaport, are reportedly the
subject of a <a href="http://articles.philly.com/2013-08-19/news/41422833_1_mccaffery-law-firms-lise-rapaport">federal
investigation</a>
stemming from referral fees that Rapaport — who works
as her husband’s chief aide — accepted from some of the state’s top law
firms, according to a <a href="http://articles.philly.com/2013-03-05/news/37440909_1_referral-fees-contingency-fee-referral-payments"><i>Philadelphia
Inquirer</i>
investigation</a>. McCaffery’s lawyer has told reporters that the referral
fees did not violate the state’s judicial codes. McCaffery’s 2012 financial
disclosure reveals that his wife earned income from Harrisburg firm Schmidt
Kramer and Philadelphia firm Silverman &amp; Fodera while employed by the
court. It is not clear how much was earned, though, because the state does
not require disclosure of specific amounts or types of income.</p>
</div>
<div class="reports" data-state="Pennsylvania"></div>
<div class="card" data-state="Pennsylvania"></div>
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type="text/javascript"></script>Chris Zubak-Skeeshttps://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/chris-zubak-skeesReity O'Brienhttps://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/reity-obrienKytja Weirhttps://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/kytja-weirChris Younghttps://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/chris-young2012 financial disclosures for top state judgeshttp://www.publicintegrity.org/node/13810See the library of documents we used in our &#039;Justice Obscured&#039; investigation.2014-09-30T15:53:14-04:002013-12-04T00:01:00-05:00<div class="stateSupremeCourtDisclosure">
<h3>Alabama</h3><div class="reports" data-state="Alabama"></div>
<h3>Alaska</h3><div class="reports" data-state="Alaska"></div>
<h3>Arizona</h3><div class="reports" data-state="Arizona"></div>
<h3>Arkansas</h3><div class="reports" data-state="Arkansas"></div>
<h3>California</h3><div class="reports" data-state="California"></div>
<h3>Colorado</h3><div class="reports" data-state="Colorado"></div>
<h3>Connecticut</h3><div class="reports" data-state="Connecticut"></div>
<h3>Delaware</h3><div class="reports" data-state="Delaware"></div>
<h3>District of Columbia</h3><div class="reports" data-state="District of Columbia"></div>
<h3>Florida</h3><div class="reports" data-state="Florida"></div>
<h3>Georgia</h3><div class="reports" data-state="Georgia"></div>
<h3>Hawaii</h3><div class="reports" data-state="Hawaii"></div>
<h3>Idaho</h3><div class="reports" data-state="Idaho"></div>
<h3>Illinois</h3><div class="reports" data-state="Illinois"></div>
<h3>Indiana</h3><div class="reports" data-state="Indiana"></div>
<h3>Iowa</h3><div class="reports" data-state="Iowa"></div>
<h3>Kansas</h3><div class="reports" data-state="Kansas"></div>
<h3>Kentucky</h3><div class="reports" data-state="Kentucky"></div>
<h3>Louisiana</h3><div class="reports" data-state="Louisiana"></div>
<h3>Maine</h3><div class="reports" data-state="Maine"></div>
<h3>Maryland</h3><div class="reports" data-state="Maryland"></div>
<h3>Massachusetts</h3><div class="reports" data-state="Massachusetts"></div>
<h3>Michigan</h3><div class="reports" data-state="Michigan"></div>
<h3>Minnesota</h3><div class="reports" data-state="Minnesota"></div>
<h3>Mississippi</h3><div class="reports" data-state="Mississippi"></div>
<h3>Missouri</h3><div class="reports" data-state="Missouri"></div>
<h3>Montana</h3><div class="reports" data-state="Montana"></div>
<h3>Nebraska</h3><div class="reports" data-state="Nebraska"></div>
<h3>Nevada</h3><div class="reports" data-state="Nevada"></div>
<h3>New Hampshire</h3><div class="reports" data-state="New Hampshire"></div>
<h3>New Jersey</h3><div class="reports" data-state="New Jersey"></div>
<h3>New Mexico</h3><div class="reports" data-state="New Mexico"></div>
<h3>New York</h3><div class="reports" data-state="New York"></div>
<h3>North Carolina</h3><div class="reports" data-state="North Carolina"></div>
<h3>North Dakota</h3><div class="reports" data-state="North Dakota"></div>
<h3>Ohio</h3><div class="reports" data-state="Ohio"></div>
<h3>Oklahoma</h3><div class="reports" data-state="Oklahoma"></div>
<h3>Oregon</h3><div class="reports" data-state="Oregon"></div>
<h3>Pennsylvania</h3><div class="reports" data-state="Pennsylvania"></div>
<h3>Rhode Island</h3><div class="reports" data-state="Rhode Island"></div>
<h3>South Carolina</h3><div class="reports" data-state="South Carolina"></div>
<h3>South Dakota</h3><div class="reports" data-state="South Dakota"></div>
<h3>Tennessee</h3><div class="reports" data-state="Tennessee"></div>
<h3>Texas</h3><div class="reports" data-state="Texas"></div>
<h3>Utah</h3><div class="reports" data-state="Utah"></div>
<h3>Vermont</h3><div class="reports" data-state="Vermont"></div>
<h3>Virginia</h3><div class="reports" data-state="Virginia"></div>
<h3>Washington</h3><div class="reports" data-state="Washington"></div>
<h3>West Virginia</h3><div class="reports" data-state="West Virginia"></div>
<h3>Wisconsin</h3><div class="reports" data-state="Wisconsin"></div>
<h3>Wyoming</h3><div class="reports" data-state="Wyoming"></div>
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type="text/javascript"></script>Chris Zubak-Skeeshttps://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/chris-zubak-skeesReity O'Brienhttps://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/reity-obrienChris Younghttps://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/chris-youngKytja Weirhttps://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/kytja-weirDelaware earns ‘F’ for judicial financial disclosurehttp://www.publicintegrity.org/node/13724We graded each state on judicial financial disclosure.2014-05-19T12:19:51-04:002013-12-04T00:01:00-05:00<div class="stateSupremeCourtDisclosure">
<div class="page">
<div class="stateFace">H</div>
<p class="intro">The Center for Public Integrity <a href="//www.publicintegrity.org/2013/12/04/13808/state-supreme-court-judges-reveal-scant-financial-information">evaluated the disclosure rules</a> for
judges in the highest state courts nationwide. The <a href="//www.publicintegrity.org/2013/12/04/13805/how-states-scored-judicial-financial-disclosures">level of disclosure</a> in
the 50 states and the District of Columbia was poor, with <a href="//www.publicintegrity.org/2013/12/04/13816/how-states-scored-judicial-financial-disclosures">43 receiving failing grades</a>,
making it difficult for the public to identify potential conflicts of interest
on the bench. Despite the lack of information in the public records, the
Center’s investigation found nearly three dozen <a href="//www.publicintegrity.org/2013/12/04/13815/justices-ruled-their-own-financial-interests">conflicts</a>,
questionable gifts and entanglements among top judges around the country.
Here’s what the Center found in Delaware:</p>
<div class="profile">
<div class="gradeContainer" data-state="Delaware"></div>
<h4>Strengths:</h4>
<p>Unlike many states, Delaware scored points in every category of The Center
for Public Integrity’s grading rubric — just not very many. The state scored
highest in the accountability category, because judges can face misdemeanor
charges for filing late reports or knowingly filing false reports. Delaware
also scored a few points in the gifts section because judges must disclose
the value of each gift they receive, in addition to the source of the gift.</p>
<h4>Weaknesses:</h4>
<p>Delaware doesn’t require judges to disclose information about financial
interests held exclusively by their family members. Nor must judges report
specific dollar values for their income or financial assets, including
stocks and real estate. Delaware’s financial disclosures are available
by request, but they are not posted online. In an email to the Center,
Janet Wright, the former counsel of Delaware’s Public Integrity Commission,
wrote that the state agency does not post financial disclosure reports
online “because information could be garnered from them that could be used
to ‘phish’ for account numbers or create a false identity.”</p>
<h4>Highlights:</h4>
<p>According to his financial disclosure, Justice Randy Holland keeps himself
busy outside the courtroom. The justice reported earning income in 2012
from four universities. Holland is an adjunct professor of law at <a href="http://law.widener.edu/Academics/Faculty/ProfilesDeAdj/HollandRandyJ.aspx">Widener
University</a>, <a href="http://law.wustl.edu/faculty_profiles/profiles.aspx?id=1642">Washington
University in St. Louis</a>, <a href="http://law.vanderbilt.edu/bio/randy-holland">Vanderbilt
University</a> and the <a href="http://www.law.uiowa.edu/faculty/randall-holland.php">University
of Iowa</a>. In an interview, Holland told the Center that the course
he teaches at Widener is a night class. The classes at the other schools,
meanwhile, are primarily taught on weekends. Teaching “is what I like to
do in my free time,” he said, adding that his course load does not interfere
with his work on the bench. In fact, Holland says teaching makes him a
better judge. “It’s been helpful,” he said. “It helps you stay current.
When you teach, it helps you bring your thoughts together.”</p>
</div>
<div class="reports" data-state="Delaware"></div>
<div class="card" data-state="Delaware"></div>
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type="text/javascript"></script>Chris Zubak-Skeeshttps://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/chris-zubak-skeesReity O'Brienhttps://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/reity-obrienKytja Weirhttps://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/kytja-weirChris Younghttps://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/chris-youngMinnesota earns ‘F’ for judicial financial disclosurehttp://www.publicintegrity.org/node/13740We graded each state on judicial financial disclosure.2014-05-19T12:19:51-04:002013-12-04T00:01:00-05:00<div class="stateSupremeCourtDisclosure">
<div class="page">
<div class="stateFace">W</div>
<p class="intro">The Center for Public Integrity <a href="//www.publicintegrity.org/2013/12/04/13808/state-supreme-court-judges-reveal-scant-financial-information">evaluated the disclosure rules</a> for
judges in the highest state courts nationwide. The <a href="//www.publicintegrity.org/2013/12/04/13809/methodology-how-we-graded-state-supreme-court-financial-disclosure">level of disclosure</a> in
the 50 states and the District of Columbia was poor, with <a href="//www.publicintegrity.org/2013/12/04/13805/how-states-scored-judicial-financial-disclosures">43 receiving failing grades</a>,
making it difficult for the public to identify potential conflicts of interest
on the bench. Despite the lack of information in the public records, the
Center’s investigation found nearly three dozen <a href="//www.publicintegrity.org/2013/12/04/13815/justices-ruled-their-own-financial-interests">conflicts</a>,
questionable gifts and entanglements among top judges around the country.
Here’s what the Center found in Minnesota:</p>
<div class="profile">
<div class="gradeContainer" data-state="Minnesota"></div>
<h4>Strengths:</h4>
<p>Minnesota is toughening its requirements starting next year, meaning its
lousy grade will undoubtedly improve. Legislation passed this year will
require judges to file an additional form that other state officials already
file. The form will ask judges to report investments, locally owned real
estate and even involvement in horse racing starting in January 2014. But
the new requirements will be phased in over six years, said Gary Goldsmith,
executive director of the Campaign Finance and Public Disclosure Board.</p>
<h4>Weaknesses:</h4>
<p>Currently, Minnesota is at the back of the pack for financial disclosure
requirements, ranking 45th in the country along with Iowa. The state is
one of just three that does not release financial disclosure reports to
the public except when requested in person. It has a self-policing system
for enforcing the disclosure rules, in which Supreme Court justices would
be asked to rule on a complaint about themselves. And the state currently
does not require judges to report gifts, investments such as stocks or
any financial debts on the one-page form. Court communications director
John Kostouros said the state is less prone to corruption than say, Illinois
or New York. “You really have to watch public officials in those states,”
Kostouros said. “Minnesota has a very low tolerance for corruption.”</p>
<h4>Highlights:</h4>
<p>NFL Hall of Famer and former Minnesota Vikings defensive tackle Alan Page,
now a Supreme Court Justice, is not required to report his involvement
in the Page Education Foundation, which has accepted donations from groups
that have come before the court. At least 20 law firms, for example, gave
the foundation more than $1,000 in the 2011 fiscal year, according to the
foundation’s annual report. Several of them subsequently brought cases
before the court, according to a review by the Center. Page’s involvement
with the foundation has been questioned multiple times in the past, resulting
in guidance from the state’s Judicial Standards Board on how to run the
foundation without jeopardizing his work on the bench. Following that advice,
Page told the Center he does not participate in any fundraising for the
organization. Neither he nor any members of his family earn any income
from the Page Foundation. “The Foundation has a policy prohibiting discussion
of donors in my presence,” Page wrote the Center. “In conjunction with
that policy I am not involved with and do not know who the Foundation solicits
for contributions. To the extent that I inadvertently learn the name of
a donor that is a factor I would consider in any recusal decision I might
have occasion to make.”</p>
</div>
<div class="reports" data-state="Minnesota"></div>
<div class="card" data-state="Minnesota"></div>
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type="text/javascript"></script>Chris Zubak-Skeeshttps://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/chris-zubak-skeesReity O'Brienhttps://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/reity-obrienKytja Weirhttps://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/kytja-weirChris Younghttps://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/chris-youngRhode Island earns ‘F’ for judicial financial disclosurehttp://www.publicintegrity.org/node/13756We graded each state on judicial financial disclosure.2014-05-19T12:19:51-04:002013-12-04T00:01:00-05:00<div class="stateSupremeCourtDisclosure">
<div class="page">
<div class="stateFace">m</div>
<p class="intro">The Center for Public Integrity <a href="//www.publicintegrity.org/2013/12/04/13808/state-supreme-court-judges-reveal-scant-financial-information">evaluated the disclosure rules</a> for
judges in the highest state courts nationwide. The <a href="//www.publicintegrity.org/2013/12/04/13809/methodology-how-we-graded-state-supreme-court-financial-disclosure">level of disclosure</a> in
the 50 states and the District of Columbia was poor, with <a href="//www.publicintegrity.org/2013/12/04/13805/how-states-scored-judicial-financial-disclosures">43 receiving failing grades</a>,
making it difficult for the public to identify potential conflicts of interest
on the bench. Despite the lack of information in the public records, the
Center’s investigation found nearly three dozen <a href="//www.publicintegrity.org/2013/12/04/13815/justices-ruled-their-own-financial-interests">conflicts</a>,
questionable gifts and entanglements among top judges around the country.
Here’s what the Center found in Rhode Island:</p>
<div class="profile">
<div class="gradeContainer" data-state="Rhode Island"></div>
<h4>Strengths:</h4>
<p>Rhode Island won full credit for its non-investment income disclosure
requirements for Supreme Court justices. The high court’s jurists must
file two forms — one with the Rhode Island Ethics Commission and another
with the court itself — which ask for information about spouses’ income
sources and the gift and travel reimbursements judges receive each year.
Rhode Island also boasts strong accountability measures; judges who report
incomplete or inaccurate statements are subject to fines and perjury charges.</p>
<h4>Weaknesses:</h4>
<p>The ethics commission asks five different questions about the business
interests of a public official and his or her family, but only for investments
valued at $5,000 or more. Additionally, no description or specific value
of a judge’s investments need be disclosed — only the name of the business.</p>
<h4>Highlights:</h4>
<p>Justice Maureen McKenna Goldberg is married to <a href="http://www.goldberglawoffices.com/profiles.html">Robert
Goldberg</a>, former Republican state Senate minority leader and one of
the state’s top lobbyists. Robert Goldberg reported lobbying fees of at
least $765,000 in 2012, according to <a href="http://sos.ri.gov/ltpublic/?page=lobbyfirm_detail&amp;lobbyfirmId=169&amp;sessionId=9">Rhode
Island Secretary of State</a> filings. His top clients were GTECH, a lottery
and online gambling company based in Providence, and drugstore giant CVS
Caremark, also headquartered in the state. Rhode Island’s rules of judicial
conduct require justices to disqualify themselves from participating in
cases where a spouse has a financial interest. “Justice Goldberg and her
husband are both keenly aware of the other’s position and how appearances
are important,” court spokesman Craig Berke told the Center.</p>
</div>
<div class="reports" data-state="Rhode Island"></div>
<div class="card" data-state="Rhode Island"></div>
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type="text/javascript"></script>Chris Zubak-Skeeshttps://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/chris-zubak-skeesReity O'Brienhttps://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/reity-obrienKytja Weirhttps://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/kytja-weirChris Younghttps://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/chris-youngJustices ruled on their own financial interestshttp://www.publicintegrity.org/node/13815See the nine justices we found who ruled on their own financial interests.2014-05-19T12:19:51-04:002013-12-04T00:01:00-05:00<p>The federal recusal statute says that judges may not sit if they or their family members have even one share of stock in one of the parties involved in the case. However, the rules vary on the state level. In <a href="/2013/12/04/13808/state-supreme-court-judges-reveal-scant-financial-information">a review of state high court disclosure requirements</a>, The Center for Public Integrity found 14 cases in which judges participated in cases in which they or their spouses held stock in one of the parties.</p>
<div class="stockConflicts">
<div class="stateFace">B</div>
<h2><a href="/2013/12/04/13717/alabama-earns-f-judicial-financial-disclosure">Alabama</a></h2>
<h3>Justice Jacquelyn Stuart</h3>
<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="stockConflict">
<tr>
<td class="conflictLabel">Stock:</td>
<td><strong>Regions Financial Corp.</strong> (RF)</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="conflictLabel">Estimated value*:</td>
<td>Not disclosed but she reported earning less than $1,000 in annual dividends.</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="conflictLabel">Case:</td>
<td>A securities-fraud lawsuit brought by a group of shareholders against Regions Financial Corp.</td>
</tr>
</table>
<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="stockConflict">
<tr>
<td class="conflictLabel">Stock:</td>
<td><strong>3M Co.</strong> (MMM)</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="conflictLabel">Estimated value*:</td>
<td>Not disclosed but she reported earning less than $1,000 in annual dividends.</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="conflictLabel">Case:</td>
<td>A change-of-venue petition related to a class-action lawsuit brought by Alabama landowners who claimed that 3M and other companies had polluted their property with dangerous chemicals.</td>
</tr>
</table>
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<td class="conflictLabel">Judge's response:</td>
<td>Stuart declined to comment about her stock ownership but pointed to Alabama’s Code of Conduct, which states that de minimis levels of stock ownership do not jeopardize a judge's impartiality.</td>
</tr>
</table>
<div class="stateFace">E</div>
<h2><a href="/2013/12/04/13721/california-earns-c-judicial-financial-disclosure">California</a></h2>
<h3>Justice Kathryn Werdegar</h3>
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<tr>
<td class="conflictLabel">Stock:</td>
<td><strong>Wells Fargo &amp; Co.</strong> (WFC)</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="conflictLabel">Estimated value*:</td>
<td>Between $100,001 and $1 million.</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="conflictLabel">Case:</td>
<td>Denied an appeal to a couple who accused Wells Fargo of predatory lending and unlawful foreclosure.</td>
</tr>
</table>
<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="stockConflict">
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<td class="conflictLabel">Judge's response:</td>
<td>“The justice regrets the error and thanks you for bringing it to her attention,” said court spokesman Cathal Conneely. “The Supreme Court is reexamining its internal conflict of interest procedures to prevent similar errors in the future.”</td>
</tr>
</table>
<div class="stateFace">U</div>
<h2><a href="/2013/12/04/13736/maine-earns-f-judicial-financial-disclosure">Maine</a></h2>
<h3>Justice Warren Silver</h3>
<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="stockConflict">
<tr>
<td class="conflictLabel">Stock:</td>
<td><strong>Idexx Labratories, Inc.</strong> (IDXX), held by his wife</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="conflictLabel">Estimated value*:</td>
<td>About $28,300, based on market price of 320 shares.</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="conflictLabel">Case:</td>
<td>A zoning case involving Idexx in a land dispute with its neighbors over quarrying by another neighbor.</td>
</tr>
</table>
<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="stockConflict">
<tr>
<td class="conflictLabel">Judge's response:</td>
<td>“At the time that I made the ruling, I didn’t even realize she owned the Idexx stock,” Silver told the Center. “If I had realized it at the time, I would have recused myself.”</td>
</tr>
</table>
<div class="stateFace">S</div>
<h2><a href="/2013/12/04/13738/massachusetts-earns-d-judicial-financial-disclosure">Massachusetts</a></h2>
<h3>Chief Justice Roderick Ireland</h3>
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<tr>
<td class="conflictLabel">Stock:</td>
<td><strong>Wells Fargo &amp; Co.</strong> (WFC), held by his wife</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="conflictLabel">Estimated value*:</td>
<td>Not disclosed but more than $1,000.</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="conflictLabel">Case:</td>
<td>A case about banks' documentation of mortgages, a decision that voided some of the bank’s foreclosures.</td>
</tr>
</table>
<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="stockConflict">
<tr>
<td class="conflictLabel">Judge's response:</td>
<td>Court spokeswoman Jennifer Donahue said on behalf of the justice that recusal is only required when a judge has a more than de minimis economic interest that could be substantially affected by the outcome of a proceeding.</td>
</tr>
</table>
<h3>Justice Robert Cordy</h3>
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<tr>
<td class="conflictLabel">Stock:</td>
<td><strong>Bank of America</strong> (BAC)</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="conflictLabel">Estimated value*:</td>
<td>Not disclosed but more than $1,000. "Several hundred shares," according to court spokeswoman Jennifer Donahue.</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="conflictLabel">Case:</td>
<td>A case accusing the bank of using unfair and deceptive business practices as a trustee on the leasing of land used as a dump.</td>
</tr>
</table>
<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="stockConflict">
<tr>
<td class="conflictLabel">Judge's response:</td>
<td>Court spokeswoman Jennifer Donahue said on his behalf that he owned several hundred shares of Bank of America stock, which she said did not require his recusal under the court's standards.</td>
</tr>
</table>
<div class="stateFace">c</div>
<h2><a href="/2013/12/04/13744/nebraska-earns-f-judicial-financial-disclosure">Nebraska</a></h2>
<h3>Justice Lindsey Miller-Lerman</h3>
<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="stockConflict">
<tr>
<td class="conflictLabel">Stock:</td>
<td><strong>Deutsche Bank</strong> (DB)</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="conflictLabel">Estimated value*:</td>
<td>Not disclosed but at least $1,000.</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="conflictLabel">Case:</td>
<td>A case about about the sale of a foreclosed home.</td>
</tr>
</table>
<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="stockConflict">
<tr>
<td class="conflictLabel">Stock:</td>
<td><strong>United Parcel Service</strong> (UPS)</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="conflictLabel">Estimated value*:</td>
<td>Not disclosed but at least $1,000.</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="conflictLabel">Case:</td>
<td>A case about determining the benefits for a part-time worker injured while working at United Parcel Service.</td>
</tr>
</table>
<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="stockConflict">
<tr>
<td class="conflictLabel">Stock:</td>
<td><strong>Union Pacific Corp.</strong> (UNP)</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="conflictLabel">Estimated value*:</td>
<td>Not disclosed but at least $1,000.</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="conflictLabel">Case:</td>
<td>A mother of a 13 year old killed by a train sued the railroad company over a waiver she signed after the death.</td>
</tr>
</table>
<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="stockConflict">
<tr>
<td class="conflictLabel">Judge's response:</td>
<td>She did not return calls for comment.</td>
</tr>
</table>
<div class="stateFace">a</div>
<h2><a href="/2013/12/04/13750/north-carolina-earns-f-judicial-financial-disclosure">North Carolina</a></h2>
<h3>Justice Robert Edmunds</h3>
<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="stockConflict">
<tr>
<td class="conflictLabel">Stock:</td>
<td><strong>Abbott Laboratories</strong> (ABT)</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="conflictLabel">Estimated value*:</td>
<td>Not disclosed but at least $10,000.</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="conflictLabel">Case:</td>
<td>The case hinged on whether lawyers from out of state, representing a mother whose baby died, should have been allowed to try the case against a hospital and Abbott, which made the baby formula her infant drank.</td>
</tr>
</table>
<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="stockConflict">
<tr>
<td class="conflictLabel">Stock:</td>
<td><strong>Wells Fargo &amp; Co.</strong> (WFC)</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="conflictLabel">Estimated value*:</td>
<td>Not disclosed but at least $10,000.</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="conflictLabel">Case:</td>
<td>The court’s ruling upheld a lower court’s decision about proving who held a loan in a foreclosure case, which found that Wells Fargo did not need to present an original note to show it held a mortgage.</td>
</tr>
</table>
<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="stockConflict">
<tr>
<td class="conflictLabel">Stock:</td>
<td><strong>Duke Energy Corp.</strong> (DUK)</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="conflictLabel">Estimated value*:</td>
<td>Not disclosed but at least $10,000.</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="conflictLabel">Case:</td>
<td>A case on a rate hike sought by the energy company.</td>
</tr>
</table>
<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="stockConflict">
<tr>
<td class="conflictLabel">Judge's response:</td>
<td>He said his ownership stake was not significant and did not affect his decisions.</td>
</tr>
</table>
<div class="stateFace">v</div>
<h2><a href="/2013/12/04/13766/wisconsin-earns-f-judicial-financial-disclosure">Wisconsin</a></h2>
<h3>Justice Annette Ziegler</h3>
<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="stockConflict">
<tr>
<td class="conflictLabel">Stock:</td>
<td><strong>Merck &amp; Co. Inc.</strong> (MRK) and <strong>Johnson &amp; Johnson</strong> (JNJ)</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="conflictLabel">Estimated value*:</td>
<td>More than $50,000 in each company.</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="conflictLabel">Case:</td>
<td>The state accused pharmaceutical manufacturers of charging inflated drug prices to the state’s Medicaid system.</td>
</tr>
</table>
<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="stockConflict">
<tr>
<td class="conflictLabel">Judge's response:</td>
<td>She did not return calls for comment.</td>
</tr>
</table>
<h3>Justice Ann Walsh Bradley</h3>
<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="stockConflict">
<tr>
<td class="conflictLabel">Stock:</td>
<td><strong>Nestle</strong> (NSRGY)</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="conflictLabel">Estimated value*:</td>
<td>At least $5,000.</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="conflictLabel">Case:</td>
<td>The company challenged a tax assessment on a powdered infant formula manufacturing plant.</td>
</tr>
</table>
<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="stockConflict">
<tr>
<td class="conflictLabel">Judge's response:</td>
<td>She declined to comment.</td>
</tr>
</table>
<p style="font-size:80%">* Many states do not require values to be reported but have a minimum threshold for when judges must report a financial stake in a company.</p>
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Reity O'Brienhttps://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/reity-obrienChris Younghttps://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/chris-youngKytja Weirhttps://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/kytja-weirChris Zubak-Skeeshttps://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/chris-zubak-skees